Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter

SOL I D STAT E I NSU R R E CT ION

SOLID STATE I NSUR R ECTION

HOW T H E SCI E NCE OF SU B STA NCE

M A DE A M E R ICA N PH YSICS

M AT T E R JOSE PH D . M A RT I N

U N I V E RSI T Y OF PI T TSBU RGH PR E S S

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4538-3 ISBN 10: 0-8229-4538-X Cover art: Dave Barfield/National MagLab Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

For my mother, who taught me to think before asking why

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xiii INTRODUCTION



What Is Solid State Physics and Why Does It Matter? 3

1. The Pure Science Ideal and Its Malcontents 18 2. How Physics Became “What Physicists Do” 32 3. Balkanizing Physics 54 4. The Publication Problem 76 5. Big Solid State Physics at the National Magnet Laboratory 6. Solid State and Materials Science 119 7. Responses to the Reductionist Worldview 135 8. Becoming Condensed Matter Physics 152 9. Mobilizing against Megascience 170 CONCLUSIONS

199

Notes 213 Bibliography 243 Index 267

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The coziest of coffee shops and pubs sometimes dedicate a few square feet of wall to the books that patrons have penned at their tables, and a writer might requite with a tip of the hat to a gemütlich retreat that helped overcome paralyzing bouts of writer’s block. I wish I could recognize one clean, well-lighted place, but this project intersected with a peripatetic phase of my life; it took shape in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Waterville, Maine; East Lansing, Michigan; and Leeds, Kenilworth, and Cambridge, England—and while I was to-ing and fro-ing among them. With that in mind, I thank instead the (dearly departed) Federal Aviation Administration ban on the use of electronic devices during taxi, takeoff, and landing. More than once, that forced respite sent my mind meandering toward some of this book’s central arguments, which found their earliest form in frantic scrawl on air sickness bags. Those moments bore fruit only because I was traveling between institutions populated with the best sort of people. The Program for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota made even conceiving of this project possible. Michel Janssen and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt steered it deftly from its jejune beginning to something approaching maturity, with healthy assists from Alan Love, Bob Seidel, Ken Waters, and Bill Wimsatt. The Physics Interest Group and the working papers seminar of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science put several of these chapters through their paces and I benefited from conversations with Will Bausman, Victor Boantza, Nathan Crowe, Lois Hendrickson, Maggie Hofius, Adrian Fisher, Amy Fisher, Xuan Geng, Cameron Lazaroff-Puck, Barbara Louis, Charles Midwinter, Aimee Slaughter, Jacob Steere-Williams, and many others. I have spent two invaluable years in residence at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (once when it was still the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science). I recommend it to everyone I meet. Babak Ashrafi is a scholarly force multiplier; on top of being one of the clearest-thinking critics I have encountered, he has built a community ideal

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for enriching projects like this one. My fellow Philly fellows Sarah Basham, Rosanna Dent, Lawrence Kessler, Kurt MacMillan, Alicia Puglionesi, and Michelle Smiley consistently challenged me to think in new ways, and this book is the better for it. While in Philadelphia, I had the privilege to haunt the halls of the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), home to some of the sharpest readers in the East. I am grateful for invaluable feedback from the CHF writing group, where Carin Berkowitz, Ben Gross, Roger Eardley-Prior, James Voelkel, and numerous other participants prompted me to hone various chapters. My colleagues at Colby College—Jim Fleming, Paul Josephson, and Lenny Reich—and Michigan State University—Rich Bellon, James Bergman, Marisa Brandt, Megan Halpern, Rebecca Kaplan, Dan Menchik, Richard Parks, Isaac Record, and Catherine Westfall—provided me with strong, supportive communities as this book was taking shape. Catherine in particular has been my champion since the very early stages of this project. She showed me how the history of solid state physics could find an audience. Most recently, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge has offered an ideal environment in which to see this project through its final stages. I have also been the beneficiary of fruitful comments from and conversations with Joan Bromberg, Bob Crease, Clayton Gearhart, Greg Good, Lillian Hoddeson, Catherine Jackson, Jeremiah James, Christian Joas, Leo Kadanoff, Bill Leslie, Kathy Olesko, Peter Pesic, Greg Radick, Michael Riordan, Ann Robinson, Richard Staley, James Sumner, Andy Warwick, Ben Wilson, and Andy Zangwill. My errors are in spite of them. Research for this book was made possible by the generosity of the University of Minnesota Graduate School; the Friends of the Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics; the American Philosophical Society; the Chemical Heritage Foundation; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science; and the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center. These organizations funded the research that permitted me to contribute further to the towering debt the historical profession owes to the fabulous archivists and librarians who have assumed the unenviable task of bringing the mountains of paper the Cold War generated to heel. Abby Collier and the University of Pittsburgh Press have been a delight to work with throughout. I am sorely in hock to Abby for her patience, perceptiveness, and unfailingly good advice, and to the press’s reviewers and

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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copyeditor for their careful reading of the manuscript and thoughtful criticisms that much profited the final version. Finally, my deepest thanks to Margaret Charleroy, who makes it all worthwhile. Those flights that had me scribbling frantically onto air sickness bags, or in the vanishing margins of in-flight magazine ads for “America’s Best Doctors,” were mostly because the early phases of our careers kept us separated by many miles, and, at times, continents. With patience and acuity, she read large portions of the writing that resulted. This book is her fault.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACS

American Chemical Society

AEC

Atomic Energy Commission

AIME

American Institute of Mechanical Engineers

AIP

American Institute of Physics

AIPH American Institute of Physics. Office of the Director, Records of Elmer Hutchisson, 1948–1966. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD AIPK American Institute of Physics. Office of the Director, Records of H. William Koch, 1932–1988. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD AIPM American Institute of Physics. Governing Board Meeting Min utes, 1931–1990. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD AIPS American Institute of Physics. Office of the Secretary Records, 1931–2000. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD APS

American Physical Society

APSM American Physical Society Meeting Minutes and Membership Lists, 1902–2003. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD APSR American Physical Society. Records. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD ARPA

Advanced Research Projects Agency

ASM

American Society for Metals

AvHP Arthur von Hippel Papers. MIT Archives and Special Collec tions, Cambridge, MA

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BAR University of Chicago, Office of the President, Beadle Admin istration Records. University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, Chicago BES

Basic Energy Sciences (United States Department of Energy)

BKS Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory COSMAT Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering CRS

American Physical Society, Division of Solid State Physics. Correspondence of Roman Smoluchowski, 1943–1947. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD

CSSP Cyril Stanley Smith Papers. MIT Archives and Special Collec tions, Cambridge, MA DFD

Division of Fluid Dynamics (American Physical Society)

DFT

Density functional theory

DOD

Department of Defense

DOE

Department of Energy

DSSP

Division of Solid State Physics (American Physical Society)

EPWP Eugene P. Wigner Papers. Princeton University Archives, Princeton, NJ FBP Francis Bitter Papers, 1925–1967. MIT Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, MA FBPS

Felix Bloch Papers. Stanford University Archives, Stanford, CA

FSP

Frederick Seitz Papers. University of Illinois Archives, Urbana

GPHP Gaylord P. Harnwell Papers. University of Pennsylvania Ar chives, Philadelphia HAR University of Chicago, Office of the President, Hutchins Ad ministration Records. University of Chicago Special Collec tions Research Center, Chicago HBP Harvey Brooks Papers. Harvard University Archives, Cam bridge, MA IDL Interdisciplinary laboratory (Advanced Research Project Agency) IRE

Institute of Radio Engineers

ISM

Institute for the Study of Metals (University of Chicago)

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

JCP

xv

Journal of Chemical Physics

JCSP John C. Slater Papers. American Philosophical Society, Phila delphia JFI

James Franck Institute (University of Chicago)

JHVVP John H. Van Vleck Papers. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD KBP Kenneth Bainbridge Papers. Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA KKDP Karl K. Darrow Papers. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, Col lege Park, MD LAR University of Chicago, Office of the President, Levi Adminis tration Records. University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, Chicago LIR Laboratory for Insulation Research (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) LKP Leo Kadanoff Papers. University of Chicago Special Collec tions Research Center, Chicago MAB

Materials Advisory Board (National Research Council)

MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NAL

National Accelerator Laboratory

NAS

National Academy of Sciences

NML

National Magnet Laboratory

NMLR

Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory. Records. MIT Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, MA

NRC

National Research Council

NSF

National Science Foundation

PTDR American Institute of Physics, Physics Today Division Re cords, 1948–1971. Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, MD RGPP Robert G. Parr Papers. Chemical Heritage Foundation, Phila delphia RLE Research Laboratory of Electronics (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

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Radio Research Laboratory (Harvard University)

RRLR Radio Research Laboratory. Records. Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA SDI

Strategic Defense Initiative

SLAC

Stanford Linear Accelerator

SSC

Superconducting Super Collider

WSP William Shockley Papers. Stanford University Archives, Stan ford, CA

SOL I D STAT E I NSU R R E CT ION

introduction

WHAT IS SOLID STATE PHYSICS AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Solid state physics sounds kind of funny.

—GREGORY H. WANNIER, 1943

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the largest scientific instrument ever proposed, was also one of the most controversial. The enormous particle accelerator’s beam pipe would have encircled hundreds of square miles of Ellis County, Texas. It was designed to produce evidence for the last few elements of the standard model of particle physics, and many hoped it might generate unexpected discoveries that would lead beyond. Advocates billed the SSC as the logical apotheosis of physical research. Opponents raised their eyebrows at the facility’s astronomical price tag, which stood at $11.8 billion by the time Congress yanked its funding in 1993. Skeptics also objected to the reductionist rhetoric used to justify the project—which suggested that knowledge of the very small was the only knowledge that could be truly fundamental—and grew exasperated when SSC boosters ascribed technological developments and medical advances to high energy physics that they thought more justly credited to other areas of science. To the chagrin of the SSC’s supporters, many such skeptics were fellow physicists. The most prominent among them was Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize–winning theorist. Anderson had risen to prominence in the new field known as solid state physics after he joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1949, the ink on his Harvard University PhD still damp. In a House of Representatives committee hearing in July 1991, Anderson, by then at

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Princeton University, testified: “Particle physics is a narrow, inbred field, and it is easy for the particle physicists to create an external appearance of unanimity of goals.”1 This was not a smear against the intellectual viability of the SSC—Anderson conceded that the science it would enable would be unimpeachably sound. Rather, it was a reaction against the tendency of some particle physicists to equate their subdisciplinary priorities with those of physics writ large. It was a challenge to the position high energy physics had enjoyed as the most prestigious branch of American science for much of the Cold War. The opposition Anderson and his like-minded colleagues mounted against the SSC throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, which played out in congressional committees, scientific publications, and popular media, laid bare deep divisions that had remained largely hidden to nonphysicists up to that point. Physicists simply did not openly oppose funding for a project championed by colleagues in a neighboring specialty, especially an undertaking so high profile as the Super Collider. That reality had preserved the illusion that physicists were unanimous in their goals for decades. Anderson and his allies, by exposing rifts within the physics community, shattered that illusion. They introduced policymakers and the American public to solid state and condensed matter physics.2 These fields, although they had represented a healthy plurality of physicists since at least the early 1960s, had nevertheless remained comparatively obscure. So, therefore, had their interests. Increased visibility of solid state and condensed matter physics in policy circles heightened awareness of their distinct perspective on the identity and purpose of physics, which differed substantially from the one politically savvy nuclear and high energy physicists had been selling in the halls of power, with considerable success, since the end of the Second World War. The standoff between the SSC’s advocates and its critics was just the most recent and most public encounter in a long, intricate, and often troubled relationship between those physicists who investigated complex physical systems and those who probed the minutest constituents of matter and energy. Anderson’s testimony cut to the heart of the controversy behind the SSC: the high energy physics community, which wielded its intellectual prestige to sway patrons and policymakers alike, was wont to assume that its parochial interests represented the common mission of all of physics. But physics in the second half of the twentieth century was far from monolithic, and, from Anderson’s perspective, could not be adequately served with monolithic laboratories. This book tells the story of how solid state physicists, by developing an

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identity and a set of intellectual priorities that suited their professional goals, redefined the boundaries and mission of American physics during the Cold War. The research program to which the SSC belonged was rooted in a pure science ideal dating to the late 1800s, which had motivated the founding of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1899. But, almost from its inception, the APS was beset by demands that it do more to represent those physicists who plied their trade in industry. Solid state physics grew from a tension at the heart of American physics between the pure science ideal and the needs of industrial and applied physicists who constituted an increasing proportion of its membership as the twentieth century wore on. Once established within the APS in the late 1940s, solid state grew rapidly into the largest subfield of American physics, developing a set of interests, outlooks, and goals that at times aligned with and at other times clashed with the ideals dominant in other areas of physics. Those interests, outlooks, and goals helped define the scope of American physics and shape the identity of American physicists through the Cold War. WHAT IS SOLID STATE PHYSICS?

This deceptively simple question has some deceptively simple answers: solid state physics is the study of the physical properties of solid matter; it is a subfield of physics, the most populous in the United States for much of the later twentieth century; it is the branch of condensed matter physics that studies solids with regular crystal lattice structures. Those answers are true within their respective domains, but they gloss over a bevy of bedeviled details. Research into the properties of solids has a long history, but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that physical research on solids became the focus for a new discipline. Yes, the physicists who founded solid state physics and built it into the largest segment of the American physics community were primarily concerned with understanding the behavior of regular solids, but that casts only the palest illumination on those factors that make the field worthy of historical attention. Solid state physics is notable for what it is not as much as for what it is. When it formed in the 1940s, solid state physics defied deeply rooted ideological presumptions—most centrally the pure science ideal—that the American physics community held dear. As a result, it helped redefine the scope of physics itself in a way that would shape its role in Cold War America. Solid matter—rigid though it is—was ill-adapted for building the boundaries of a discipline when solid state physics emerged.3 The physical concepts, theoretical methods, and experimental techniques used to investigate

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solid matter were often just as readily turned to not-so-solid matter—superconductivity, observed in some solids at low temperatures, is closely related to superfluidity, another low-temperature phenomenon. A semantically strict definition of solid state physics would include the former, but not the latter (a nettlesome inconsistency that would contribute to the rise of “condensed matter physics” as a preferred term in the 1970s and 1980s). Furthermore, the vast expanse of questions physicists could ask about solids, and the equally diverse range of techniques they could use to investigate those questions, made for a diffuse field that lacked a set of central motivating questions or techniques to provide conceptual cohesion. As the editors of Out of the Crystal Maze: Chapters from the History of Solid-State Physics noted in 1992: “The field is huge and varied and lacks the unifying features beloved of historians—neither a single hypothesis or set of basic equations, such as quantum mechanics and relativity theory established for their fields, nor a single spectacular and fundamental discovery, as uranium fission did for nuclear technology or the structure of DNA for molecular biology.”4 The argument that the solid state of matter is itself a discrete physical phenomenon carries some prima facie plausibility, but it did not appear that way from the standpoint of physical theory in the 1940s. Although solidity was an easily identifiable trait of some material aggregates, the properties of solids could not be reliably characterized by a consistent theoretical approach. Whereas Maxwellian electrodynamics served as a single framework with which electromagnetic phenomena could be addressed, and physicists could reach for the laws of thermodynamics anytime they wanted to discuss heat, solids were a medium in which electromagnetism, heat, and most other physical phenomena might persist. It would be plausible to suggest that quantum mechanics provides a basis from which it is possible to understand, or even derive, most if not all the properties of solids. However, such an enterprise was unfeasible in the mid-1940s. Investigating solids instead required employing a number of theoretical approaches, both quantum and classical. Solids invited a similarly colorful array of experimental techniques. Physicists explored their properties at the extremes of low temperature and high pressure. They zapped them with neutrons, electrons, and various frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. They chemically doped them and blasted them with ultrasonic waves. They poked and prodded them with other solids. Solid state physics was a big tent, both theoretically and experimentally, and so the impetus for its formation cannot be found by searching for a consistent set of techniques or practices.

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Because it could not claim an origin in any one research tradition or regime of practice, solid state was, by the traditional standards of discipline formation, an unusual category. Before the Second World War, physics was understood to be divided into phenomenological categories like thermodynamics, acoustics, optics, mechanics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics.5 After the Second World War, a field appeared that claimed as its domain thermodynamics, acoustics, optics, mechanics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics in solids (and sometimes in other phases of matter too). Isidor Isaac Rabi’s exclamation upon learning of the discovery of the muon—“Who ordered that?”—is perhaps a more fruitful starting point for gaining purchase on the slippery history of solid state physics.6 Whose interests did a field with such an unorthodox constitution serve? What changes in the physics community allowed it to form? How did that formation come about? Given the field’s rapid growth into the most populous segment of post–Second World War American physics, what consequences propagated as a result of its heterodoxy and the changes that permitted it? In short, why did the field come to exist at all and how did it influence physics as a whole? Addressing those questions reveals that solid state physics was much more than a provincial subfield, subsidiary to the primary narratives of American physics. It was integral to negotiating the identity of physics and essential for maintaining its prestige in Cold War America. Telling this story requires trading in some well-worn categories, of which historians tend to be rightfully suspicious. Categories like pure science, or basic and applied research, are problematic. A great deal of work has shown that so-called pure science was adulterated with worldly interests, and that the artificial and not altogether coherent distinction between basic and applied research fails to hold in practice. But historians also recognize the power these categories possessed as regulative ideals that guided the way scientists organized their professional lives. Mario Daniels and John Krige have shown how “basic” and “applied” research functioned as political tools for Cold War scientists, permitting them some control over the circulation of knowledge in a context governed by military secrecy regimes.7 I approach these categories from a similar perspective and show how pure science, basic and applied research, fundamental research, and other value-laden designations were tools for disciplinary as well as national politics, and therefore reveal the ideals and convictions that gave meaning to physicists’ active efforts to systematize their professional lives.

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THE PROMINENCE OF PHYSICS IN COLD WAR AMERICA

Taking solid state and condensed matter physics as a central object of historical inquiry requires approaching old questions from a new perspective.8 A great deal of historical work addresses the question of why the Superconducting Super Collider failed, for example, but it might be more appropriate to ask why it ever had a chance to succeed in the first place.9 The US government had spent over a billion dollars on a scientific project before, but the Manhattan Project was principally an engineering endeavor, singlemindedly focused on a military objective during a time of war.10 How did it even become conceivable that a single facility dedicated to uncovering abstract knowledge might consume similar resources in peacetime? It would be tempting to answer this question by pointing to the considerable prestige and influence physics garnered from the Manhattan Project. High energy physics, which emerged from nuclear physics, had earned the latitude to pursue abstract research. Nuclear physics, after all, was exceedingly abstract, even into the 1930s, and it had resulted in the most fearsome weapon the world had ever seen by 1945.11 This familiar story reflects aspects of the exalted heights physics attained in Cold War American society, but it neglects what most physicists were actually doing. For all its visibility, high energy physics, which cast itself as the intellectual heir to nuclear physics, constituted only around 10 percent of the American physics community at the time of the SSC’s cancellation. Most physicists were not probing atomic viscera at cathedralesque accelerator facilities; they were investigating the properties of the type of matter that surrounds us and finding new things to do with it. Historians require a fuller accounting of those activities before claiming a perspective capable of explaining the place of physics in Cold War American society. It is easy to see how the historical trajectory of fields like solid state physics depended on its relationship with nuclear and high energy physics. Less obvious is the fact that this dependence was reciprocal, and that solid state—a diverse, messy field with a complicated and shifting set of conceptual dependencies—in some respects better represents physics as a whole than do its more revered siblings. After the Second World War, solid state physics, plasma physics, polymer physics, and other specialties devoted to complex matter grew rapidly. Physicists working in these fields quickly came to dominate the American physics community, at least numerically. Nevertheless, the smaller proportion

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of physicists who studied the elementary components of matter and the most distant celestial objects capitalized most fully on the postwar prominence of physics. They were the most recognizable to the public, wielded the greatest influence in government, commanded the bulk of the considerable intellectual prestige physics enjoyed in the postwar era, and nurtured intellectual ideals that reinforced those advantages. The contrarian spirit apparent in Anderson’s testimony against the SSC emerged over decades as a response to this attitude, becoming central to the identity of American solid state physics. In addition to exposing long-standing disagreements about the mission and purpose of physics, the demise of the SSC symbolized the end of the era in which physics reigned as the undisputed sovereign of American science. As the SSC faltered, the Human Genome Project gathered momentum on promises that it would revolutionize biology and medicine, and surpassed physics in both public approbation and policy influence.12 The exalted position physics had held during the Cold War is nonetheless a remarkable historical phenomenon. Even toward the end of the Second World War, American physicists worried that their field was little known beyond a small group of professionals. The exceptions to this rule were iconic figures like Albert Einstein, whose fame was bound up in the legendary unfathomability of his theories.13 After the war, leaders in the physics community gained national celebrity and became familiar faces in Washington, DC, as they assumed powerful advisory roles, shaped national policy, and shepherded in an era of generous government funding for science.14 The question of how physicists first attained this position is somewhat different from the further question of how they then maintained it for half a century. An appeal to the Manhattan Project, and other wartime contributions, does provide a powerful answer to the first of these questions. The $2 billion the United States government invested in the Manhattan Project went in part toward developing a physical infrastructure that provided the template for the national laboratory system.15 The psychological immediacy of nuclear weapons helped figures such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Freeman Dyson position themselves as public intellectuals.16 The urgency of the nuclear arms race created opportunities for physicists to become deeply engaged with weapons policy, which in turn gave them clout on a wide array of public policy issues.17 The success of wartime nuclear research, which quickly turned abstruse knowledge about the submicroscopic world into a weapon that irrevocably reconfigured geopolitics, goes a long way toward explaining the exalted position of physics in early Cold War American politics and society.

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This explanation is less than sufficient, however, to account for the continued prominence of physics through the early 1990s, which included the growth of high energy physics, a field that claimed little economic, technological, or military relevance but nonetheless commanded billions of taxpayer dollars to build and operate research facilities of unprecedented scale. “Megascience,” as Lillian Hoddeson, Catherine Westfall, and Adrienne Kolb have christened it, became the standard mode of research for the most visible physics research after the Second World War.18 From the vantage point offered by a quarter century’s distance from the SSC’s demise, however, megascience seems like a Cold War fever dream. For how long is it reasonable to assume that the memory of the Manhattan Project sufficed to convince policymakers that high energy physicists should continue to enjoy a blank check from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and later, the Department of Energy, especially when they routinely denied that their work came with practical offshoots? The remarkable history of nuclear physics in the 1930s and 1940s no doubt contributed to the rapid growth of high energy physics soon after the Second World War. As Audra Wolfe explains in her history of Cold War science and technology: “High-energy physics thrived within the institutional culture of the Cold War because the AEC—the agency that bankrolled it— believed in the inherent relevance of nuclear science to the national interest. What nuclear physics wanted, nuclear physicists got.”19 This explanation captures the psychology of the 1950s and early 1960s, but it becomes less adequate later in the Cold War. Although they claimed the same ancestry, nuclear physicists and high energy physicists had formed distinct communities by the late 1960s. The former was deeply intertwined with the interests of the national security state, whereas the latter was uncompromising in its commitment to pursuing knowledge with no evident applications.20 The more high energy physics established its bona fides as a field unsullied by practical concerns the less it should have been able to trade on the promise of relevance to national defense, even though it represented an investment in national prestige. What explains the continued—and indeed ostentatious— success high energy physics enjoyed with federal patrons that ended only with the SSC’s demise in 1993? Missing from previous accounts is the contribution of solid state and related research to the image and identity of physics. As Anderson observed when he lamented the unanimous front high energy physicists presented, those viewing physics from the outside were often not equipped to distin-

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guish between the various subfields and research communities of which it was composed. To many policymakers, physics was physics. It generated arcane knowledge about the natural world and it produced fantastic gadgets. Those two functions were connected in some way; therefore, the field was deserving of support. Policymakers generally accepted the judgment of the most esteemed representatives of the field as to how that support should be allocated. Sarah Bridger’s Scientists at War recounts the recollections of New Mexico senator Clinton Anderson, who admitted weighing scientific evidence based on his instinctual trust of the individual expert delivering it, rather than on an attempt to understand the scientific content of the evidence.21 Habits such as these ensured that the politically best-placed physicists enjoyed considerable sway over the image of the field, which shaped federal funding priorities. High energy physicists’ success maintaining high levels of federal support, however, depended on provinces of physics with less political clout continuing to churn out research with near-term technological and economic relevance. The military made rapid and expedient use of semiconductor-based electronic components and improved materials. The burgeoning American consumer culture eagerly embraced the technological products of physical research such as transistors, integrated circuits, and improved bakeware and stereo equipment. American industry found uses for lasers, superconducting magnets, nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, and bespoke alloys. These originated in solid state physics and allied fields, but as long as high energy physicists succeeded in presenting their work as archetypical and policymakers remained incurious about the field’s internal diversity, the benefits of such advances accrued to its more prestigious branch. High energy physics, in short, maintained its success in part because the accomplishments of solid state physics continually renewed in the minds of federal patrons the association between physics as a whole and the technical, economic, and military benefits of a few of its endeavors. A thorough appreciation of the growth of solid state physics through the Cold War is therefore a prerequisite for understanding physics as a whole in one of the most auspicious eras in its history. THE SCOPE OF THE BOOK

In 1899, the year the American Physical Society was established, its founding president Henry Rowland wrote: “Where, then, is that person who ignorantly sneers at the study of matter as a material and gross study? Where, again, is that man with gifts so God-like and mind so elevated that he can attack and solve its problem?”22 He referred to late nineteenth-century strug-

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gles to understand the structure and behavior of atoms and molecules. The sentiments he described nonetheless colored physical investigations of solids and other complex matter throughout the twentieth century. Solid state physics often drew sneers from those who fancied that their own studies attained a greater degree of elegance and looked down their noses at “Schmutzphysik,” or “squalid state physics.” These pejoratives, the stuff of water-cooler banter rather than published invective, are attributed to Murray Gell-Mann and Wolfgang Pauli, respectively. In addition to serving particle physicists in their efforts to exalt their own studies, they provided a rallying point for solid state physicists, who found motivation in opposing such condescension.23 Far from being the grimy and inelegant enterprise high energy physicists derided, they insisted, solid state physics posed gnarly conceptual and practical problems that inspired noteworthy leaps of theoretical imagination and experimental virtuosity. The great irony of the derision directed at solid state physics is that the things that offended other physicists’ sensibilities—its focus on complex, real-world systems, its connections to industry—were the very same things that helped renew the warrant for blue-skies research so valued by those hurling the insults. This book offers a history of the American solid state physics community with the goal of illuminating how attention to it and similar fields can reveal dependencies of this type and thereby enrich, and perhaps even reform, our understanding of twentieth-century physics. It presents a story about the organizational structures of American physics and the ideas that shaped it, following the professional societies, journals, laboratories, and political interventions, as well as the discourses and disagreements that influenced what forms they took. These structures both reflected and reinforced what it meant to be a physicist in the eras in which they were built, and they changed in response to shifting ideas of professional identity and disciplinary purpose. Changing them was often a way to enact a vision of the field, of where it should go, what it should be, and whom it should serve. Through each of the changes traced here, solid state took another step toward reshaping American physics in its own image.24 Appreciating how solid state physics changed the collective identity of American physics requires understanding what came before. That is the goal of the first two chapters, which describe the dominant ideals of American physics that were established in the first half of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 charts the rise of the “pure science” ideal, which Henry Rowland mixed into the mortar of the American Physical Society. Rowland saw the society

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as a refuge for unfettered, curiosity-driven scientific inquiry that would insulate physicists from questions of technological applicability or economic relevance. The centrality of this ideal for the power brokers of the American physics community ensured that industrial physics, as it grew throughout the 1920s and 1930s, was relegated to the periphery. The increasing relevance of industry to the physics community, however, led industrial physics to seek professional satisfaction. A slew of new societies and publication outlets filled needs that the APS and the Physical Review, its flagship journal, deigned to address. Industrial physicists were not content to suffer their near exclusion from the key institutions of American physics in silence, however. Chapter 2 follows the machinations they undertook as mid-century approached, while the physics community at large set about consolidating the resources and influence it had won with its wartime labors. Improving the position of industrial physicists required crafting a new understanding of what physics was and how it should be organized. Whereas traditionalists viewed physics, and its boundaries and subdivisions, as founded in the structure of the natural world, advocates of industrial representation instead viewed disciplinary boundaries as affairs of convention that could be restructured at will to meet contemporary needs. The rise of this latter attitude paved the way for the emergence of solid state physics, a category that made little sense according to the traditional way of looking at physics in terms of discrete classes of phenomena and the practices used to investigate and explain them. The pure science ideal remained a potent force in American physics through the remainder of the twentieth century, and solid state physics emerged from the industrial insurrection against it. Chapters 3 and 4 chart the discipline as it established its first institutions and grew into the largest constituency of American physics. In chapter 3, I introduce the “group of six,” an alliance of physicists determined to create institutional space for industrial and applied researchers within the APS. Led by General Electric’s Roman Smoluchowski, the group of six organized to form what would eventually become the Division of Solid State Physics (DSSP), the first institutional expression of the field. They would not succeed without stirring up considerable controversy, however. The push to found a new APS division that would be friendlier to industrial researchers led some to worry that such efforts would compromise the society’s purpose, and therefore the unity of American physics. Those tensions persisted in spite of attempts to resolve them within the DSSP, and the push and pull between a desire for unity and a

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need for more specialized professional representation would define the field’s early years. The physics discipline’s rapid growth through the 1950s presented pressing challenges, and these are the subject of chapter 4. Solid state physics outstripped even the rapid inflation of the ranks of all physicists. The large pool of applied and industrial physicists who were underserved by the APS flocked to the new solid state division and helped establish the field’s legitimacy. The journal infrastructure, which struggled to accommodate expansion across physics as a whole, felt the greatest pressure from solid state’s rapid growth. Discussing the publication problem offered a means to negotiate lingering disquiet about the identity of solid state physics. Some favored establishing new publications and building stronger alliances with chemistry and engineering, whereas others fought hard to keep the field ensconced in physics. The latter view would win out and solid state’s commitment to securing its place within American physics ensured that the discipline as a whole would come to embrace constituencies that challenged the strong pure science ideology that defined its early decades and engage more fully with the military, economic, and industrial needs of the Cold War. The resolution of this issue and the beginnings of a stable professional identity for solid state physics came just in time for conditions that would test it. Chapters 5 and 6 both explore the influence on solid state physics of the mid-1960s funding crunch. The US government, especially the military, had funded all manner of scientific research in the immediate post–Second World War years with a generosity that bordered on the haphazard. In the mid-1960s, funding for science began to tighten. Conditions that had favored indiscriminate growth gave way to an era of red-in-tooth-and-claw competition that sowed bitterness between disciplines competing for the same dwindling funds. The tensions between those who sought to explore solid state’s technical potential and those who wanted to position it as a source of fundamental physical knowledge had not resolved, even as the field’s institutional situation had stabilized. These two chapters consider how this tension led different research groups to find different niches in the shifting funding ecology. Chapter 5 examines the possibility presented by following the lead of high energy physics and pursuing large facilities for basic research, such as the National Magnet Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. A somewhat different opportunity, discussed in chapter 6, came in the form of materials science, which remained a generous font of federal funding and provided an outlet for solid state’s applied ambitions.

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Chapter 7 introduces a sharp reaction against the technological legacy of solid state physics: the philosophical defense of emergence developed by Philip W. Anderson. Anderson, responding to the subordinate professional position solid state physicists occupied in the physics community, penned “More Is Different,” a 1972 Science article challenging the reductionist picture of the physical world that had become gospel within particle physics. The reductionist position maintained that the most fundamental knowledge, and therefore the most important, was to be found among the smallest constituents of matter and energy. Anderson’s argument that fundamental knowledge could be had at all levels of physical complexity became a rallying cry for the solid state community. The battle for intellectual recognition would lead some to distance themselves from solid state’s industrial roots, heightening internal tension between the requirements of funding solid state research and a quest for intellectual esteem. Acknowledging the intellectual value of the concepts that were necessary to appreciate the behavior of complex matter, solid state physicists argued, would necessitate rewarding their field with both greater esteem and financial support that was not linked to technological deliverables. This strategy led some to abandon the name solid state physics in favor of a new designation, condensed matter physics. Quantum mechanical treatments of complex matter had developed considerably by the 1970s. They could by then be more successfully applied to fluids—such as liquid helium— amorphous solids, and other systems that did not submit to simplification so readily as regular solids than they could in the 1950s, when solid state physics formed. The growing importance of these research areas made the field’s nominal restriction to solids increasingly uncomfortable, providing all the more reason to favor a name change. Chapter 8 traces the transition to condensed matter physics. The new name aimed to delineate a field that could claim the accomplishments of solid state and could make a more serious case that it belonged within the intellectual core of physics. Public debates over the merits of the Superconducting Super Collider, the focus of chapter 9, prompted both solid state and particle physicists to defend their intellectual and professional ideals in a high-stakes context. Particle physicists relied heavily on the reductionist rhetoric that had served them so well during the Cold War. Conscious, though, that the context had changed, many of them also embellished this justification with sometimes immodest claims about the spin-off benefits of large-scale accelerator research. Solid state physicists rallied in opposition to what they considered an ex-

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travagance. They made an aggressive case that basic research funding could be better spent in their own backyard. Opposition to the SSC rested on the claims that solid state was just as fundamental as particle physics, that funding exploratory solid state research with no strings attached would produce more socially and technologically valuable results as a matter of course, and that the concentration of federal physics funding in large facilities damaged other areas of research. This view complemented the vision of physics that had been incubated in American solid state and condensed matter physics, and that aimed to synthesize the physics community’s long-standing pure science ideal with a commitment to its technological and economic relevance. The SSC’s demise, because it marked the limits of the big science program that had dominated physics spending for decades, represented a public victory for an alternative to the hard-line pure science outlook that had been maintained in part by the technical contributions of solid state physics throughout the Cold War. The original Star Wars trilogy tells the story of a ragtag band of misfits, many of whom are adept at manipulating a force pervading everyday matter, who ally to mount an insurrection against the established order and help destroy a giant, partially built beam machine. The history of American solid state physics, as chronicled in these chapters, followed much the same plot. The field was cobbled together from a diverse assortment of research traditions, the only common element of which was a focus on the forces governing the matter that surrounds us—and how to manipulate it. Its formation represented a rejection of the traditional power structure of the American physics community, which exalted pure science and held applications in lower esteem. And it came to public prominence when many of its influential practitioners mobilized to help bring down the SSC. (The Super Collider, admittedly, was not designed for the express purpose of destroying planets, but some on the fringes have suggested that similar machines might have just that effect.)25 Many solid state physicists adopted a rebel mindset, marginalized as they were by the low status accorded applied physics and their more powerful colleagues’ derision of their intellectual efforts. Their professional machinations were calibrated to challenge this status quo. It is in this sense that the establishment and growth of solid state physics constituted a form of rebellion. Much like political uprisings, the solid state insurrection responded to specific grievances. It reflected the interests of industrial physicists, who railed against the predominant ideals of American physics and its traditional

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modes of professional organization. Subsequent efforts solid state physicists mounted to rearrange the institutions of American physics sought freedom of disciplinary association, or more equitable distribution of resources. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that solid state physicists threw off the hegemony of the pure physics ideal, but this need not weaken the metaphor. Insurrections, after all, do not always lead to overthrow. They can also involve a new integration, one that brings into the center groups whose interests were previously on the peripheries. The conclusion of this book reflects on how we can understand the history of American solid state physics in just that way.

1 THE PURE SCIENCE IDEAL AND ITS MALCONTENTS

We form an aristocracy, not of wealth, not of pedigree, but of intellect and of ideals, holding him in the highest respect who adds the most to our knowledge or who strives after it as the highest good. —HENRY ROWLAND, 1899

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the American continent in the 1830s, he was struck that “hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially abstract and theoretical portion of human knowledge.”1 Democracy, combined with the nominal egalitarianism of American culture, he contended, incentivized near-term practical gain over the aimless surmise that Europe’s aristocratic traditions and hereditary wealth afforded. Abstract knowledge was a luxury of the traditional elite, and so languished in a society that disdained elitist traditions. When the American physics community coalesced at the turn of the twentieth century, it would do so in explicit opposition to this tendency, crafting a vision of “pure” science designed to keep the pragmatism of American culture at bay and to encourage a scientific culture that could stand alongside the established physics traditions of Europe. Physics in nineteenth-century Europe was the province of a social and intellectual elite. In Britain, it was dominated by veterans of the notoriously demanding Cambridge mathematical tripos, open in practice only to wellheeled members of the Anglican establishment.2 In the Germanic states, physics had secured a stable place in secondary education by the mid-1800s, but its internationally recognized researchers were drawn from the upper echelons of society and its institutions, such as the Physikalisch-Technische

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Reichsanstalt, were by and for the ruling classes.3 But neither of these august traditions claimed to be “pure” in the way the term was understood by American physicists at the turn of the century. As abstract as the mathematics that powered British thermodynamics and electromagnetism was, it was unapologetically linked to British industry, in particular the telegraph cables and steam engines that sustained its global empire. And following unification in 1871, industrial progress became a similarly potent concern for German physicists.4 When American physicists envisioned their field as a pure intellectual endeavor, above and apart from the practical demands of society, they understood themselves to be emulating their European counterparts. To the extent that they adopted Europe’s sensibilities, however, they did so with the fervor of the converted. They crafted a new ideal, all the more staunch because it took the practical bent of American culture as its foil. The pure science ideal remained a cherished element of American physicists’ identity throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but this does not mean that all or even most of the physics practiced in the United States was remote from technological and economic concerns.5 The American Physical Society, founded in 1899, grew quickly beyond its thirty-six charter members, and an appreciable portion of its growth in the first few decades of the twentieth century was in the industrial sector. Many American physicists individually saw no reason to shy away from industry, but the institutions of American physics worked to marginalize industrial physics and maintain pure science as a regulative ideal. This background is crucial to appreciate the rise of solid state physics, which represented an industrial incursion into the pure science citadel that had been erected, and for the most part successfully defended, through the first half of the twentieth century. If solid state physics emerged as an institutional salve for a conflict of ideals within American physics, then addressing the ideals that suffused the early institutions of American physics is necessary to understand the conditions that made it possible.6 HENRY ROWLAND AND THE PURE SCIENCE IDEAL

At the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Augustus Rowland, one of the few Americans to enjoy an international reputation in physics, observed much the same state of affairs as Tocqueville. The practically minded Thomas Edison was the public face of American science, and Rowland lamented that “much of the intellect of the country is still wasted in pursuit of so-called practical science which ministers to our physical needs but little thought and money

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is given to the grander portion of the subject which appeals to our intellect alone.” Rowland and thirty-five others founded the American Physical Society (APS) to minister to the intellect.7 Rowland had spent 1875–76 studying in Europe, during which time his views on the proper conduct of science crystallized.8 He worked in Herman von Helmholtz’s Berlin laboratory, where he grew to admire the German research university and the continental tradition of theoretically oriented science pursued by a cultural and intellectual elite. These experiences served him well in the appointment he assumed on his return to the United States, at the newly formed Johns Hopkins University, which was founded with a research mandate. In Rowland’s eyes, universities were only one element of a strong scientific community, which also required robust professional institutions to act as a bulwark against the economic enticements to technical work that suffused American culture. He understood “pure science”—by which he meant unfettered pursuit of truth about the natural world, free from the demands of immediate useful application and the allure of pecuniary reward— not only as a prerequisite for scientific truth, but also as a moral imperative. “Let us hold our heads high with a pure conscience while we seek the truth,” he implored his fellow physicists at the second meeting of the APS.9 The categories of “pure” and “applied” science as Rowland understood them were at once clearly delineated and inextricably linked. Rowland might have scorned the Edisonian pursuit of profit, but not so much that he sought to deny the place of scientific knowledge as a wellspring of novel know-how. Rather, he insisted that the pursuit of knowledge could only function properly and yield those benefits when it was insulated from the diversionary influence of mercantilism.10 And he thought that strong professional institutions could provide such protections. Rowland died in 1901, but his elitism was woven into the fabric of the American Physical Society, which began as a distinctly ivory tower institution.11 In 1902, the society’s third year, only 4 of its 144 members reported job titles or affiliations that reflected industrial employment.12 Industrial membership grew gradually in the following decades. As of July 1920, approximately 60 percent of its membership was affiliated with academic institutions, compared with about 24 percent in industry and 9 percent in government jobs.13 Despite such growth in the industrial sector, the officers of the society all claimed university affiliations in 1920, as did the vast majority of the seventeen-member council, which included just two employees of government laboratories and one representative from industry.14

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Growth in the society’s industrial membership, and the contrasting continuity of its academic leadership, indicate the extent to which the APS was an island, and sought to remain one. Historians have consistently and forcefully challenged the sharp distinction between pure and applied science that Rowland sought to maintain (and the post–Second World War distinction between basic and applied research that was its heir). As David F. Noble observed in 1977, and many others have reinforced since, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a closer connection between science and technology. The resulting emphasis on science-based, profitoriented industrial production led Paul Lucier to dub it the Tinseled Age. A basis in physics and chemistry became a mark of professional identity for the emerging engineering disciplines and industrial development became firmly linked with scientific research, especially during and in the wake of the First World War.15 Nor did this science–industry alliance emerge in opposition to an existing, entrenched pure science ideal. Graeme Gooday observes that the visions of pure science championed by Rowland in the United States and by Thomas Henry Huxley in Britain were new. As much as Rowland understood his vision to be rooted in the great intellectual traditions of Europe, the idea that taxpayers and philanthropists had an obligation to bankroll intellectual pursuits unmoored from the practical questions of the age was novel.16 A selective reading of history of the physical sciences led Huxley to conclude that “practical advantages . . . never have been, and never will be, sufficiently attractive to men inspired by the inborn genius of the interpreter of Nature, to give them courage to undergo the toils and make the sacrifices which that calling requires from its votaries.”17 Thermodynamic and electromagnetic theory, the hugely successful and intellectually revered physical accomplishments of Huxley’s own age, in fact owed both a material and intellectual debt to the expanding technological infrastructure of the industrial revolution.18 The APS, which thumbed its nose at industrial capitalism, proceeded with the firm conviction that influence did and should flow from abstract knowledge to practical use, but not the other way around. That position did not get easier to maintain as the twentieth century wore on. The First World War in particular strengthened the connection between abstract research and technical implementation that Rowland and his cohort had hoped to resist. The demands of the First World War led many to lament the artificiality of the pure/applied division. John J. Carty used his presidential address to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1916 to observe:

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Arising out of this agitation comes a growing appreciation of the importance of industrial scientific research, not only as an aid to military defense but as an essential part of every industry in time of peace. . . . I consider that it is the high duty of our institute and of every member composing it, and that a similar duty rests upon all other engineering and scientific bodies in America, to impress upon the manufacturers of the United States the wonderful possibilities of economies in their processes and improvements in their products which are opened up by the discoveries in science.19

The University of Chicago botanist John Merle Coulter contended, “The public has begun to recognize the fact that pure and applied science are not mutually exclusive fields of activity, but complementary, and therefore public support for pure science has been growing, and as a consequence the practical achievements of pure science in connection with the war, it bids fair to enter upon its own public estimation and support.”20 To those outside of physics, and to some within, the relationship between science and industry appeared reciprocal rather than hierarchical. That perception was bolstered by a genuine strengthening of the connection between physics and industry. Industrial research laboratories blossomed during the first decades of the twentieth century. The General Electric Research Laboratory, founded in 1900, offered a proof of concept that inspired other industrial concerns to invest in research. The AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories, established in 1925, fostered a research culture that encouraged its scientists to remain open to the unexpected in the hopes of maintaining its advantage in electronic communications technology. Bell became the first industrial laboratory to produce a Nobel Prize winner in physics when Clinton Davisson won in 1937 for a 1927 experiment that demonstrated electron diffraction, confirming a theoretical prediction of Louis de Broglie.21 The wave behavior of electrons illustrates the blend of pure and applied research fostered at Bell. It was at once a fundamental physical discovery and something a telephone company, which was in the business of transmitting electrons, would very much like to know. The promise of the possibility, at least, to conduct curiosity-driven research, along with the higher salaries the private sector could offer, lured many physicists into industry—and the prominence that Bell in particular achieved, in part on account of Davisson’s prize, positioned it to become the most influential solid state physics hub after the Second World War. Through the 1920s and 1930s, industrial laboratories not only employed an appreciable proportion of American physi-

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cists but also generated an appreciable proportion of the papers published in American physics journals.22 The cultural differences between industry and academia nevertheless remained sharp. Industrial research, even when directed toward scientific insight, required its own style, one that understood insight and applications to be of a piece, and that did not rank them within a strict value hierarchy.23 Although American industry was becoming much enamored of physicists, American physics—or at least its flagship society—had little affection for industry. The prevailing attitude through mid-century is reflected in a piece of doggerel that made the rounds at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory in 1944, celebrating Isidor Isaac Rabi’s Nobel Prize by praising his self-abrogative disdain for the comparative riches available to physicists who went corporate: Now all you bright young fellows with your eyes upon the stars, You graduate assistants who subsist on peanut bars If industry should woo you with two hundred bucks a week Refuse the job and say, without your tongue in your cheek, It ain’t the money It’s the principle of the thing It ain’t the money There’s things that money can’t buy It ain’t the money That makes the nucleus go round It’s the philosophical ethical principle, we keep telling ourselves, of the thing.24

The song conveyed the sense of moral superiority that came with resisting the higher salaries industry was able to offer, along with the consensus that the most interesting intellectual work remained the province of university research. Within a context that favored closer contacts between science and commerce, the pure science ideal that the APS staunchly maintained prompted institutional growth elsewhere in American physics. Three new societies formed between 1916 and 1929 representing narrower specialties, each with a prominent focus on instrumentation and/or applications. The Optical Society of America grew out of Eastman-Kodak’s research laboratories and was intended to serve the needs of a growing group of industrial researchers studying interactions between light and matter.25 The Acoustical Society of America, whose first meeting was hosted at the Bell Telephone Laborato-

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ries in 1929, also had industrial roots and was directed toward engineering interests.26 That same year saw the formation of the Society of Rheology, dedicated to the newly named science that studied the deformation of matter. Its founders embraced their field’s potential applications, noting in their announcement of the new society: “Heraclitus was probably correct in saying that ‘everything flows’ and the major problems of great industries dealing with nitrocellulose paint, varnish, artificial textiles, metals, rubber, etc., have to do with elastic deformation and flow.”27 None of these groups would have found a warm welcome in the APS. Wallace Waterfall, founding member of the Acoustical Society, recalled that “if anybody had come along then with the idea of setting up divisions of the Physical Society and having the Acoustical Society become one of those divisions, why, that wouldn’t have gone over at all.”28 The Physical Society’s conscious decision to spurn applications created a need for new professional outlets that served the growing community of applied and industrial physicists. ACCOMMODATING APPLIED PHYSICS

Members of application-oriented professional organizations who were trained in physics continued to think of themselves as physicists, even if the APS was not their professional home. If it hoped to remain a cohesive community, American physics would need a larger corral. On May 3, 1931, representatives from the three newly formed societies and the APS assembled at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC. The occasion was the first meeting of the American Institute of Physics (AIP).29 The new organization was principally a publishing operation coordinating the collective print output of these organizations—and, some months later, of the American Association of Physics Teachers, itself newly established. The AIP, an organization of organizations, must have seemed unwieldy to many in a community that until recently had been so small. It was a recognition, however, of “the fact that there was then no single society that drew together all those whose primary scientific interest was in the field of Physics,” as the committee charged with planning the AIP’s post–Second World War activities would recall in 1945.30 The AIP was a concession to the fact that American physics was becoming larger and more diffuse. Abraham Pais, in his reflections on the Physical Review—the undisputed journal of record of American physics for the better part of the past century—recalled that in the 1930s dedicated physicists could still read “the green monster,” as it was known, cover to cover and maintain a panoramic view of the field.31 Even in 1931, however, that level of dedication

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Figure 1.1. Number of articles published in Physical Review between 1920 and 1960.

was rare and exercising it beyond the capabilities of all but the most dogged readers. Pais’s recollections must also be considered within the broader context of American physics publishing. Before 1929, the Physical Review and the Journal of the Optical Society of America were the only dedicated outlets for scholarly work in physics in the United States. That changed with the appearance of several new journals in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Reviews of Modern Physics sought to make contemporary research more digestible by summarizing lively areas in short review articles.32 Review of Scientific Instruments launched in 1930, by which time the publication expansion was already jarring to some. In the editorial that began the inaugural issue, Floyd K. Richtmyer acknowledged: “The number of scientific and technical periodicals to which any worker in either pure or applied science must refer has increased so rapidly in recent years as to raise in some minds the question of the desirability of taking steps to discourage the starting of new journals.”33 The background to his remarks included publications such as Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and Journal of Rheology, both founded in 1929. Nor was Review of Scientific Instruments the last American physics journal to appear around 1930—Physics, the Journal of Chemical Physics, and the American Physics Teacher would follow between 1931 and 1933. The number of articles the Physical Review published reached a local

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maximum in 1931, when the new journals stemmed what had been a steady rise through the 1920s (figure 1.1). It would not reach the same level again until after the Second World War.34 The panoramic view of physics one would achieve by diligently taming the green monster twice monthly thereby changed in the 1930s. The landscape shifted as whole areas of physics migrated to new outlets and the Physical Review focused more intently on keeping abreast of new and exciting developments in nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. Considering the experience of an archetypical Physical Review–reading APS member over the period from 1925 to 1935 exposes a clear shift. A typical issue of the journal in the mid-1920s included some theoretical work, including papers on quantum phenomena, but it also published a great many articles that would have found a home in more specialized journals just a few years later. By the mid-1930s, the theory quotient was higher and the journal was dominated by nuclear and quantum papers. The growth of new outlets in intervening years did not threaten the Physical Review’s status as the community’s journal of record, but it did mean that its profile was more sharply defined than it had been. It was no longer a general interest journal, at least not so far as the growing constituency of industrial and applied physicists was concerned. Anyone operating on the assumption that the APS represented American physicists and that the Physical Review published what was important to know about current physics would have perceived a sharpening of Henry Rowland’s pure science mission, rather than a dilution, even as the importance of applied physics grew within the rest of the community. The journal’s reputation also changed markedly over this span. John Van Vleck later recalled: “The Physical Review was only so-so, especially in theory, and in 1922 I was greatly pleased that my doctor’s thesis was accepted for publication by the Philosophical Magazine in England. . . . By 1930 or so, the relative standings of The Physical Review and Philosophical Magazine were interchanged.”35 John Torrence Tate became editor in 1926, the same year full-blooded quantum mechanics emerged in Europe. Van Vleck and others credited this turnaround to Tate’s eager embrace of nuclear and quantum physics, both of which advanced rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s. Van Vleck coauthored a biographical memoir for the National Academy of Sciences with Tate’s doctoral student, mass spectroscopist Alfred Nier, in which they praised Tate for showing “rare judgment and common sense in not delaying by much refereeing noteworthy papers dealing with various applications of quantum mechanics; this was important, for America was somewhat at a

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disadvantage compared to the centers of Europe, where the [quantum] revolution had germinated.”36 Pursuing a more narrowly theoretical focus and tackling the exciting changes initiated in Europe raised the Physical Review to a journal of international standing, but at the expense of its relevance to a broad swath of its domestic readership. Tate was wise to the fact that Physical Review had narrowed its scope on his watch. With this in mind, he launched a new journal, Physics, in 1931. It was designed to serve the growing cadre of applied physicists, whose publications until that point had been “scattered through a number of engineering, chemical and industrial journals.” Physics, which would be renamed the Journal of Applied Physics within a few years, hoped to attract contributions from applied researchers who felt alienated by the narrowing focus of Physical Review and to reaffirm their identity as physicists. Tate commented on the publication’s mission: The Physical Review has hitherto been the only outlet provided by the American Physical Society for the publication of original research. As you may have noted the Review has more than doubled in volume during the past six years and has become more and more the exponent of the purely introspective side of physics. This is but the natural result of the fundamental and radical changes in the logical framework of the science which have attracted the attention of an ever increasing group of active physicists. But fascinating as are the developments in atomic physics and the quantum mechanics, they do not by any means represent the whole of the science, nor are they more interesting or valuable than the original work of the greater number of professional physicists who are applying physical methods and principles to the problems of other sciences and the industries.37

Physics was both an overture to applied physicists and an act of demarcation that placed them outside its center. Applied research would not be left to diffuse into chemical and engineering journals and the industrial gray literature, but neither would it be granted a berth on the flagship vessel of the American Physical Society. THE MAP OF PHYSICS, 1939

In 1939, Bernard H. (Bern) Porter drew a “Map of Physics” (figure 1.2). Porter was a graduate student in physics at Brown University. The following year he would be enlisted into the Manhattan Project, on which he worked at Princeton University and Oak Ridge until he quit three days after the bomb-

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Figure 1.2. Bern Porter’s Map of Physics, 1939. The caption reads: “Being a Map of Physics, containing a brief historical outline of the subject as will be of interest to physicists, students, and laymen at large. Also giving a description of the land of physics as seen by the daring souls who venture there. And more particularly the location of villages (named after pioneer physicists) as found by the many rivers. Also the date of founding of each village. As well as the date of its extinction. And finally a collection of various and sundry symbols frequently met with on the trip.” Reproduced with permission of Mark Melnicove, literary executor for Bern Porter, [email protected]. From Bern Porter Collection, Colby College, Special Collections, Miller Library, Waterville, Maine

ing of Hiroshima, traumatized and disillusioned with physics. He would instead follow his passion for art, which he used as an outlet for his lifelong struggle with the responsibility he felt he shared for the development of nuclear weapons. But in 1939 he remained enamored of physics. His map celebrated the pioneering instinct of the “daring souls” who venture into the frontiers of physical knowledge. It also encoded an idea about what physics was that was central to the American pure science ideal. Porter’s map is both an artifact and a literal illustration of the habits of mind that relegated applied and industrial research to the fringes of the American physics community. It represents the various provinces of physics —mechanics, sound, electricity, magnetism, light, heat, and astronomy—as geographical regions linked to one another by energy, depicted as a river fed

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Figure 1.2a. From Bern Porter’s Map of Physics, 1939.

Figure 1.2b. From Bern Porter’s Map of Physics, 1939.

by mechanical and electromagnetic tributaries (and a reservoir of radioactivity), feeding into an ocean labeled “Research: The Future of Physics” (figure 1.2b). Physics, thus represented, is conceptually unified and historically continuous, defined by phenomena that existed in the world (figure 1.2a). Physicists, who give their names to the villages dotting the landscape, are the ones who expose those phenomena and deduce the rules governing them. Technology is a foreign land in this rendition. Physics is out there in the world; physicists are those daring souls called to discover it on the downstream journey toward the frontiers of research. Conceiving of physics in this way encouraged the organizational assumptions that precluded industrial physics from gaining purchase in the American Physical Society. This outlook was further ill-equipped to accommodate a field like solid state physics. It is difficult to imagine how Porter might have represented solid state had he updated the map a decade later. Solid state physicists hailed from almost all the distinct geographical regions represented on the map. The

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difficulty of locating their work within this visual schema illustrates the fact that solid state physicists did not explore a discrete region of physics in the traditional sense. Solid state physics was not a self-contained assembly of topics and methods that could be conveniently represented as a river, island, continent, or other natural outcropping of the disciplinary landscape. Porter channeled an ethos of classification that was characteristic of the previous century’s science. Nineteenth-century natural philosophers often understood taxonomy as an essential piece of their mission, operating from the conviction that proper classification could reveal the order inherent in nature. The same ethos extended to classifying the sciences themselves.38 William Whewell wrote in 1840: “A sound classification must be the result, not of any assumed principles imperatively implied to the subject, but of an examination of the objects to be classified;—of an analysis of them into the principles in which they agree and differ. The Classification of Sciences must result from the consideration of their nature and contents.”39 The assumption that the sciences themselves, like the objects of their study, possessed intrinsic features that allowed them to be distinguished naturally and unambiguously continued into the twentieth century and shaped attitudes among American physicists. That assumption encouraged resistance to categories like industrial physics, and indeed solid state physics, which did not slot neatly into a perceived natural order. Respect for that perceived order guided the institutions of American physics in the first half of the twentieth century, even while industrial physicists became an appreciable proportion of the community. By 1933, the institutional landscape had attained a local equilibrium. The AIP administered the eight American physics journals that remained after the Journal of Rheology ceased publication in 1932. The ranks of the APS, which remained the principle society for American physics, swelled in response to the frisson generated by nuclear and quantum physics, generous foundation support that allowed physicists with degrees from elite universities to supplement their studies in Europe, and the influx of émigrés fleeing the clouds gathering over Central Europe. Much of this growth reinforced the society’s commitment to pure science.40 The increase of the community’s size, and the role of industrial and applied physics within it, nonetheless represented a continuing challenge to the traditional ideals of the discipline. It was less the potency of the pure science ideal itself than it was its entrenchment in key institutions that made it difficult to dislodge. The power brokers of American physics, who

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understood its goal to be the extraction of raw knowledge from nature, attempted to keep the field pure with the battlements of institutional structure. Those battlements would hold until the pressures of the Second World War precipitated further reorganization. Solid state physics, when it emerged in the late 1940s, constituted the first successful insurrection against pure science fundamentalism in the APS. The establishment of a discipline that catered to the needs of industrial physicists and was organized in a way that paid little heed to natural categories represented the most substantive changes to the foundational identity and ideological commitments of the American physics community since its founding. The following two chapters explore how this challenge to traditional community ideals unfolded.

2 HOW PHYSICS BECAME “WHAT PHYSICISTS DO”

When Solomon said that “a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,” he knew what he was talking about. —OLIVER E. BUCKLEY, 1944

“Physics” was the name Oliver E. Buckley, president of Bell Laboratories, had in mind when he opened his address to the National Research Council’s Conference of Physicists with the above line. Buckley worried that this term evoked nothing concrete to the average American. The nuclear bombs detonated over two Japanese cities would fling physicists into the forefront of American public consciousness in August 1945, but the Manhattan Project remained shrouded in secrecy when Buckley spoke in May 1944. Wellpublicized contributions to the war effort would likely have made radar familiar to a substantial segment of the American public, but it was rarely linked to physics in the popular press.1 Albert W. Hull, the outgoing president of the American Physical Society, had remarked earlier that year, “It is a rare occurrence that a census taker has ever heard of a physicist, and the task of explaining is such that one is often tempted to register as a chemist.”2 Faced with this deficit, Buckley insisted that professional identity was the most primal challenge American physicists faced and encouraged the conference attendees to consider how it shaped activities from undergraduate teaching to government advising. He asked his colleagues to confront difficult questions about who they were and what they did. What was physics? Who could claim to be a physicist? Who got to decide? Daniel J. Kevles’s often-quoted response to these questions is “physics is

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what physicists do.”3 Though it might seem tautological, this slogan makes the serious point that historians, pace Whewell, should avoid the impulse to seek some essential, context-independent core of the fields they study. Disciplines are historically contingent social entities that might be assembled in different ways at different times by different people acting on different motives. The contingency of human-built categories is gospel to today’s historians, who are likely to accept this point unflinchingly. The same, though, cannot be said for the people who constructed those categories in the first place. Many mid-twentieth-century physicists, notably those who controlled the American Physical Society (APS), would have bristled at the suggestion that their field consisted in anything other than a set of preexisting empirical regularities, which they took as their task to discover and formalize. Understanding “physics” to refer to something existing in the world, they might have suggested a different slogan: physics is what physicists pursue. To these traditionalists, who were also the fiercest defenders of the pure science ideal, “physics” remained a fixed set of natural phenomena, whose structure determined who was a physicist and who was not. They suggested that anyone whose principal interest was not the discovery and elaboration of general physical principles belonged more properly in engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, or another field. As the community of American physicists grew, however, populating industrial laboratories and seeking concessions to the demands of technical and applied work, a larger portion of the community began to insist that physicists, not nature, held authority over the scope and organization of physics. Stanford University’s William W. Hansen, replying in 1943 to his colleague David L. Webster’s suggestion that physics was defined by the pursuit of natural physical laws, wrote: “I wouldn’t want to attempt a precise definition, but it would seem that your criterion sets the sights terribly high. How many physicists do you know who have discovered a law of nature? You have, I know, and so has Compton and perhaps one or two others I don’t know or think of. But really, it seems to me, this privilege is given only to a very few of us. Nevertheless the work of the rest is of value.”4 The rest tended to agree. Perspectives more sympathetic to the Kevles dictum began to exert their influence in the mid-1940s. Some outside the traditional core of academic physics, and even some within, came to understand their discipline as a community with the latitude to define and redefine itself as it proved convenient. The circumstances of the mid-1940s presented opportunities that made reevaluating the traditional definition of the physicist convenient indeed.

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Buckley’s 1944 lecture addressed the anxieties that came to the fore as these competing agendas for defining physics were brought into tension by the centrifugal effects of growth and diversification. Advocates of both perspectives developed a number of strategies for answering the questions Buckley posed, and these competed for traction as American physicists assayed the possibilities that the post–Second World War environment would offer them. By the time the American physics community found its footing in the postwar era, the understanding that physics was “what physicists do”—and so could change if physicists started to do different sorts of things—had motivated changes in the discipline’s institutional structure, with wide-ranging consequences for how it would develop through the Cold War. With the foregoing in mind, I propose my own, equally glib alternative to the Kevles dictum: physics is what physicists decide it is. American physicists in the 1940s did not merely realize that physics could be understood as the sum of their activities, or a relevant subset of them; they seized upon their agency to organize their discipline so as to proactively delineate the types of activities that fit within it. That agency scarcely needed to be exercised in the era when the community was small and divisions within it slight. As the population boomed and the institutional character of physicists’ employment changed entering the mid-century, however, that agency became critical.5 Physics became what physicists did during the Cold War by means of concerted efforts on the part of a small group of individuals working within the institutional constraints of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the APS. Their vision was opposed by a group of influential traditionalists who maintained that simply earning a degree in physics did not make one a physicist—or at least was not sufficient for one to remain a physicist—and actively sought to keep some of the things that physicists did from working their way into the definition of the field. PHYSICS AS NATION: THE UNITED STATES OF PHYSICS

In the early 1940s, “the physicists’ war” raged. It had earned that name even before the transformative influence of nuclear weapons research became clear.6 Physicists recognized that the Second World War would bring them new relevance to American society; in 1943 and 1944, as the war’s end came into focus, a scramble to shape postwar physics began. Opinion pieces discussing existing challenges and future development of physics peppered physics journals. The relationship between industry and academia garnered significant attention. The arrangement reached in the 1930s, which allowed

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the APS to rededicate itself to pure research while the raft of societies serving applied interests was held in loose confederation by the AIP, was unsatisfactory to many. Wartime nationalistic rhetoric was in the air. Physicists breathed it in, exhaling it again in their discussions of their discipline’s future. Those who favored a more ecumenical approach to defining physics, which the AIP embodied, rallied around the notion of a “United States of Physics,” composed of many provinces, each with its own local character, held together by a political commitment to the unity of the discipline. In the face of a growing population of industrial researchers, the question of what position industrial physics would occupy in this union loomed large. The stakes of debate over industry’s place in postwar physics were, in the mid-1940s at least, more ideological than practical. Only after the war would the wider physics community gain a clear understanding of how the abundance of federal dollars would reshape their research. Furthermore, physicists weathered the ravages of the great depression better than most, and thus funding was not so prominent a concern as it would become just a few years later.7 Discussions in the final years of the Second World War, carried out almost exclusively by those physicists not sequestered conducting secret research for the Manhattan Project, turned instead on the question of dignity. For adherents to Rowland’s traditional pure science ideal, physics maintained its disciplinary dignity through its status as a calling, rather than a profession. But the growing mass of applied and industrial researchers for whom physics was a profession first—those who saw physics as an intellectually rewarding path to a comfortable middle-class existence, and who would drive what David Kaiser has called “the postwar suburbanization of American physics”—saw their professional dignity impugned by calls that their interests be kept at a remove from the real business of physics.8 Although they differed in their preferred solutions, both these groups shared the concern that industry and academia had drifted too far apart. The issue appeared in many screeds on the future of physics.9 In 1943, Thomas H. Osgood of Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (as Michigan State University was then known) put the problem thus: “Both in the past and now, technical physicists have known too little about the work, both in research and teaching, in which their academic colleagues are engaged; and an even more lamentable ignorance of the practical problems of the age which are being solved by physicists in industry has been displayed by those who train students in the rudiments of physics in our educational institutions.”10 Osgood voiced frustrations that many industrial researchers

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felt as they tried to maintain their identity as physicists within a field that considered applied work intellectually subordinate. Many similar expressions of frustration appeared in the Review of Scientific Instruments column “Contributed Points of View,” in which physicists could sound off about professional issues—a function that Physics Today would assume in 1948. In the February 1945 issue, Morris Muskat of Gulf Research Laboratory gave a detailed account of the professional challenges that industrial physicists faced and described the ways in which existing institutional structures failed to serve them. The industrial physicist “must work intimately with the chemist, the electronics engineer, the acoustical engineer, the color expert, the hydraulics engineer, or whoever has given him the problem and will make use of its solution when achieved,” Muskat wrote. Industrial physicists generally worked on problems of someone else’s design and for companies that were unlikely to pay expenses for conference travel. Working in this context, Muskat suggested, alienated industrial researchers from their academic colleagues who dominated the APS, membership in which became, for the industrial physicist, “a traditional ‘hangover’ from his youthful professional pride of his school days,” serving no useful professional function.11 Muskat urged the APS to become more responsive to its industrial members, especially by supporting the formation of special interest divisions. This suggestion was an alternative to a proposal popular among many applied physicists that would have seen the AIP replace the APS as the official organization of American physicists. The principle advocate of this solution was Gaylord P. Harnwell, the head of the physics department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would later serve as president. As editor of Review of Scientific Instruments, Harnwell enjoyed a front-row seat to the wrangling over the future of physics that played out in the journal, and he used his editorial pulpit to nudge it in the directions he found most productive. In an editorial published in August 1943, Harnwell set down the challenges as he saw them and articulated his favored solution. The problems facing physics included the large number students, both undergraduate and graduate, whose training had been derailed by war work and who would emerge from their wartime assignments without adequate foundational training.12 “There will be more physicists after the war, but the great majority of them will have the technical or craftsman’s attitude toward the science rather than the professional or academic point of view,” Harnwell predicted. This posed a challenge, especially alongside the increased social and political

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cachet physics was beginning to enjoy. Harnwell’s principle concern was that the technical accomplishments of physics, which were relatively easy to communicate to nonspecialist audiences, would come to dominate public awareness of the field and undermine support for abstract research. This concern, along with worries about establishing effective training programs and finding stable sources of research support, led Harnwell to conclude that professional organization should be at the forefront of physicists’ discussions about how to conduct their affairs after demobilizing.13 A few months later, Harnwell offered his affirmative response to these troubling questions. He called for “a more perfect union” in his editorial opening the February 1944 issue of Review of Scientific Instruments, and proposed “a new American Physical Society to replace the existing associated Societies and to include all members thereof for the purpose of broadly and liberally advancing the science and technology of physics in all its branches.” Echoing others who lamented institutional rifts between the search for general principles and their applications, Harnwell insisted: “We must see to it also that no schism develops between the academic and the industrial physicist. In some respects the former tends to be the specialist and the latter the general practitioner or clinician, but without the unification of both their efforts in a common society, neither can be fully effective.”14 Harnwell fretted that both academic and industrial physics might suffer if either could not draw on the other to achieve its goals, a threat he found severe enough to propose a dramatic overhaul of the professional structure of physics. Harnwell championed a federalist view of American physics. He advocated a central organization more inclusive than the APS but stronger than the AIP, which he considered too loose a confederacy to effectively serve all physicists. He wrote favorably of a potential industrial division within the proposed new society, observing that a similar entity in the American Chemical Society had grown rapidly, serving as a nursery for a number of spin-off divisions. This vision of physics would give wide latitude for new groups to form and define novel areas of interest, while holding them together under the aegis of a strong central organization. Harnwell struck a nerve; the invitation closing his editorial to comment further on how American physics might promote unity garnered many replies, some brief, others expansive, over the next several months. Wallace Waterfall and Elmer Hutchisson responded favorably to the call for unity, using their own editorial soapbox in Journal of Applied Physics, and in so doing made Harnwell’s implicit federalism explicit.15 Their May 1944 edi-

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Figure 2.1. Map of the “United States of Physics.” The initialisms expand as follows: ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers); ASH & VE (American Society of Heating and Ventilation Engineers); AIEE (American Institute of Electrical Engineers); IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers). Reproduced from Wallace Waterfall and Elmer Hutchisson, “Organization of Physics in America,” Journal of Applied Physics 15, no. 5 (1944), 407–9, with the permission of the American Institute of Physics

torial revolved around a diagram they titled the “United States of Physics” (figure 2.1). “Obviously a strong central organization in physics is needed,” they concluded on the basis of the apparent fragmentation in the diagram. “A single society with many subject matter divisions or a ‘union’ of many ‘states’ might accomplish the desired unity in physics provided the proper balance between ‘federal’ power and ‘states’ rights’ is maintained.” Meetings and publications, they argued, could be the province of the “states,” whereas issues of broad interest to physicists and the “‘colonization’ of virgin territory”— represented by the dashed empty space on the right of the diagram—could be left to the central organization.16 Not all those covered by this unification were enthusiastic about their inclusion. Alfred N. Goldsmith, longtime RCA research engineer, wrote to the editor on behalf of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), which he had cofounded in 1912, and which is represented in Waterfall and Hutchisson’s map as dealing with the applications of electronics.17 Goldsmith complained that Waterfall and Hutchisson had inappropriately characterized the “related societies” as narrow, far-flung provinces of American physics: “It is not un-

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usual for a society or institute to define or delimit its own activities and to determine, in its own best judgment, the field of its activities. However, it is perhaps unique to find one learned society gratuitously defining the scope of other scientific organizations.” In defiance of the narrow characterization of the IRE’s role in the “United States of Physics,” Goldsmith observed: “Of necessity, problems of mechanical construction, optical theory and design . . . and acoustical theory . . . have been exhaustively treated in the Proceedings of the I. R. E.”18 Goldsmith’s ire exposed weaknesses in the federalist approach that ultimately doomed the idea of a strong, unifying umbrella society to replace the AIP. A plan that ceded overall control of fundamental research to the American Physical Society ran afoul of other societies’ interests. Organizations like the IRE aimed not just to support applied research, but to foster a give and take between fundamental and applied research that was rare within the confines of the APS. The unification scheme also drew the outer boundaries of physics too sharply for some and failed to account for the roles played by smaller societies that expanded into other fields. In short, the strong federalism of Harnwell, Waterfall, and Hutchisson elided the real benefits fragmentation had provided those specialties that were poorly served by the APS and underestimated the extent to which subjugation under an umbrella society would be unwelcome among these constituencies. Goldsmith’s entry into the conversation is notable for another reason: as an electrical engineer, he represented an explicit fear of the helmsmen of the inchoate field of solid state physics. Electrical engineering and physics, once of a piece, had drifted apart early in the twentieth century.19 Some physicists worried that the study of solids would follow the same path, losing the potential to benefit from heightened postwar prestige and isolating itself from problems of purely theoretical interest. General Electric’s Roman Smoluchowski, in his 1943 manifesto initiating the effort to found the APS Division of Solid State Physics, anticipated the increased demand for physics training after the war, especially in new subfields concerned with complex matter, and insisted, “We would like them to remain branches of physics rather than to become new . . . types of ‘engineering.’”20 Similar commentary on the looming institutional changes in American physics dotted the letters section of the Journal of Applied Physics and Review of Scientific Instruments over the months following the publication of Waterfall and Hutchisson’s editorial. Applied physicists, for the most part, favored a federalist approach in which a large umbrella society with loose

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membership criteria would confer unity on physics without organizing that unity around a central spire of pure research. Three physicists from the Case School of Applied Science (which would merge with Western Reserve University in 1967) wrote to offer a “hearty second” to Harnwell’s proposal, and recorded feeling “confident that these groups [societies such as the Optical Society, Acoustical Society, and Association of Physics Teachers] would benefit immensely by giving up a little of their autonomy in order to unify the profession of physics in America.”21 In the same letters column, Thomas Osgood added his support and echoed a popular dissatisfaction among applied physicists with the status quo, writing: “To say that the activities of this society do not now meet the needs of the majority of American physicists is to cast no slur upon the American Physical Society, but rather to emphasize that physics has so broadened its scope since the end of the last century that the academic and theoretical subjects which are the special concern of this society may legitimately make no immediate appeal to many active physicists.”22 Applied researchers preferred the prospect of participating in a unified field of physics to the possibility of increasing their autonomy by forming their own societies and journals. This preference fueled their frustration with the APS, which by this time was under the sway of, and therefore catered most strongly to, theorists—and the experimentalists who tested theoretical claims—most of whom held academic appointments. The tenuous consensus within the applied physics community was that political unity should be maintained and that it should be built on a broad, inclusive view of physics—although disagreements remained on the issue of federal authority versus states’ rights. From the federalist perspective, the American Institute of Physics, rather than the American Physical Society, sat at the appropriate scale for a flagship society. Applied physicists saw the APS as a haven for pure researchers—a label that representatives of the APS did little to disavow. They advocated expanding the powers of the AIP, which included groups such as the Optical Society and the Acoustical Society and which promoted more freely the mixing of theory and experiment, basic and applied research, so that academic interests would not dominate the central governing body of American physics.23 Unity, in this context, meant preserving and promoting mechanisms that encouraged generous application of the title “physicist” so as to increase dialogue both within and across physical specialties. The federalist approach to postwar physics represented the growth of the conviction that physics did need to be understood, at least in part, as “what

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physicists do,” the consequence being that those physicists doing things not traditionally recognized by the APS deserved representation nevertheless. The orthodoxy within the American Physical Society was somewhat different. APS officials, council members, and fellows were unenthused by the idea that their society be unseated in favor of the AIP, or a new entity made in its image, as the principal organization of American physics. Despite the dissatisfaction of applied physicists, the APS still wielded the power necessary to definitively influence how the field would be structured. The modularity of the APS’s divisional scheme, which had been instituted in 1931 and allowed organized interest groups to form a division of the society around a welldefined topic of physics, gave it an advantage in negotiations about the organization of American physics. Frederick Seitz’s address at the APS meeting of January 1945 titled “Whither American Physics?” articulated a position that expressed the stance of those advocating for the American Physical Society.24 Seitz, like many of his contemporaries, saw physics as naturally split into two parts: “In the first place it contains a body of knowledge which has intrinsic value as a form of culture. This component is commonly called ‘fundamental’ or ‘pure’ physics. . . . In the second place, physics serves as a source of fundamental knowledge for a majority of the important fields of engineering.” Unlike a considerable number of his colleagues, Seitz exhibited little concern about the growing rift between the two branches, as exemplified by the academic/industrial split, emphasizing that “the terms ‘fundamental physics’ and ‘applied physics’ are in no sense synonymous with ‘academic physics’ and industrial physics.’” In keeping with the traditional view that emphasized continuity with Henry Rowland’s vision for pure science, he defended the role of the APS as an institutional organ for basic research. “The principal aim of the Society,” Seitz claimed, had been “to publish a journal and arrange meetings in which fundamental physics was emphasized.” If the society expanded its scope to include an emphasis on applied research, he continued, then no other organization would remain to protect the interests of exploratory research.25 On these grounds, Seitz argued that divisions should proceed within the APS in such a way, (a) that they did not encourage compartmentalization, and (b) that they did not lead to too much emphasis being placed on applied physics. On point (b), Seitz opined: “The danger from this source is particularly great at present because the vast majority of physicists is concerned with problems of applied physics. This includes many men who were hitherto concerned only with pure physics. A large number of these men desire

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quite naturally to continue this type of work after the war and may, as a result, feel that the society to which they belong should be adjusted to suit their new interests.” Although he recognized the same trend toward applied work as those who favored restructuring physics around the AIP, Seitz preferred to retain the privileged place of basic research. He suggested that, rather than expanding the APS or elevating the AIP, applied physicists could find a professional outlet in existing AIP member societies and engineering societies, or start a new association for applied physics to address their needs.26 Seitz argued that fundamental research was the driving force behind all of physics. Physics did not need to be institutionally unified, according to this stance, because applied work necessarily relied on advances in foundational basic research: “The great importance of fundamental physics as a spring for the well of technology assures us that the development of this field has social value even if we adopt the most hard-headed attitude towards society.” Basic researchers, in other words, need not be worried about the safety of their social importance, because it would be guaranteed by the dependence of applied research on basic research. Applied physicists and basic physicists had “no basic quarrel on the issue of whether or not fundamental physics should be pursued, even though they may feel that their objectives lie apart.”27 Physics, for Seitz, was conceptually unified—he did not perceive organizational discomfit as a threat to unity—and the first objective of the American Physical Society should be to serve and advocate for the physicists who investigated basic concepts. Powerful allies such as the well-connected APS secretary Karl K. Darrow and George W. Stewart, who was president of the APS in 1942, joined in Seitz’s defense of the APS. Unlike Seitz, these figures coincided with Harnwell and company in perceiving the increasing rift between the academic and industrial communities as a threat to the unity of American physics. Their principal concern, however, was with conceptual purity rather than political unity. They sought to prevent industrial interests from diluting the APS’s avowed commitment to pure science, and organized to prevent the formation of an APS division devoted to industrial or applied physics. The APS council, impelled by such concerns, succeeded in blocking several proposals for an industrial division. Industrial physicists were becoming progressively more chagrinned by the fact that the society was not geared to their needs. The council fielded letters to this effect through the early 1940s. One industrial researcher, W. W. Lozier of the National Carbon Company, griped that the programs for APS meetings were not published early enough for em-

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ployees of industrial laboratories engaged in deadline-driven practical work to request leave and suggested that the society generate notices earlier. On this count, the council determined, without noting the irony, that changing existing procedures would be “impractical.”28 Another, A. V. Ritchie, complained that APS publications did not list specific job titles when printing names of industrial researchers, and thus conveyed no indication of the individual’s rank with an organization.29 By 1943, the council was aware enough of the growing desire among physicists employed in private enterprise to participate in the affairs of the society to address, however tepidly, “the topic loosely described as ‘encouragement of industrial physicists.’”30 Encouraging industrial physicists, however, did not extend to granting them a division of their own. In the September 1943 issue of Journal of Applied Physics, Darrow delivered a shot across the bow to proponents of an industrial division, reporting the APS council’s intention to veto any efforts to reshape the Physical Society in a way that would further isolate academia and industry: Letters have been received conveying the idea of a “Division of Industrial Physics.” The Council is disinclined to favor this idea, which incidentally appears to be precluded by the language of Article IX. One of the things most greatly to be desired is a unification of the physicists called “academic” and the physicists called “industrial.” It is important to avert the danger of a lack or loss of interest by either group in the problems and the enterprises of the other. Now, the establishment of a “Division of Industrial Physics” would work in exactly the opposite direction. That way lies the peril of forming two contrasting groups, whose aims and ambitions ought to be alike but would infallibly deviate more and more as the years go on.

Darrow did not unilaterally oppose APS divisions and had backed the APS council’s approval of the Division of Electron and Ion Optics. He encouraged proposals for additional divisions, but cautioned that they “be limited in scope to a particular field or fields of physics.”31 Darrow’s stance amounted to an official defense of the values on which the society had been founded. The APS council, through Darrow’s voice, stood by the assumption that physics, if it were to be subdivided at all, should only be carved along clear conceptual lines. Article IX, to which Darrow referred, had been added to the APS constitution in 1931 in tandem with the formation of the American Institute of Physics. It permitted APS divisions to form around “specified subject or subjects in physics.”32 Darrow, by suggesting that this language

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precluded a division dedicated to industrial physics, upheld the assumption that a “subject” within physics had conceptual roots. Borders, as established by divisions, would reflect natural categories of knowledge rather than prevailing professional or institutional categories. This attitude, intentionally or not, favored an academic approach to physics.33 Academic physicists were more inclined to devote themselves to single, clearly defined research areas predicated on their interests and the resources available at their institutions, and to build their professional identities within those research areas. For them, conceptually defined APS divisions made good sense; such divisions would likely include the bulk of other physicists with whom they would want to interact. Some generational forces were at play in the APS council’s resistance to an industrial division. The members of the APS council in 1943 included, in addition to Darrow, president Albert W. Hull, vice-president Arthur J. Dempster, treasurer George Pegram, along with elected members Joseph C. Boyce, William F. G. Swann, Ferdinand Brickwedde, Alpheus W. Smith, and Henry DeWolf Smyth. Only Brickwedde and Boyce, both with 1903 birthdays, had been born in the twentieth century and six of the nine were over fifty. Their collective scientific work was largely in the early twentieth-century American tradition of academic-style, instrument-focused research. Having matured amid the prewar orthodoxy, they would have been naturally suspicious of any proposed category that deviated from society tradition and so offered a strict interpretation of the requirement that new divisions be subject-based.34 An arrangement that permitted only narrowly conceived topical divisions was challenging for industrial physicists. Rather than focusing in depth on a particular research area, an industrial research physicist would often shift focus to meet the needs of individual projects. Physicists whose work in acoustics was contingent on a project with a fixed timeline, after which they might turn to thermodynamics or mechanics, had little incentive to join the Acoustical Society of America. The same logic would apply to divisions. Topical divisions, even if they marked out areas of primarily applied interest, would not have been a strong draw for industrial physicists who were often expected to adapt their skills to a wide range of topics as exigencies demanded. Darrow lamented the growing rift between academia and industry, but his proposed solution, which admitted only subject-based divisions, narrowly understood, bolstered the traditional academic view in which physics was unified, and formed its identity, on the basis of the character of the knowledge it pursued. His concern that industrial physicists were becoming isolated

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amounted to the suspicion that they might drift too far from the mainstream of basic research and stop doing work that qualified as physics. Insisting that divisions maintain topical foci would force industrial physicists to define themselves conceptually in order to affirm their identity as physicists. BELLING THE CAT AT THE CONFERENCE OF PHYSICISTS

The fable of the bell and the cat tells of a group of mice plotting to control a marauding cat. The mice debate strategies back and forth before settling on a proposal that calls for hanging a bell around the cat’s neck, so that they might hear it approaching. But when it comes to deciding who will take up the task of attaching the bell to the cat’s collar, volunteers are scarce and excuses abundant. Karl K. Darrow, secretary of the American Physical Society, invoked this fable to describe the state of American physics in the early 1940s. The community was in broad agreement that change was afoot and that American physicists should do something to manage that change and prepare for post–Second World War conditions, but few were willing to compromise their own interests for the good of the collective. The full spectrum of perspectives described above was on display at the National Research Council (NRC) Conference of Physicists, a “‘town meeting’ of physics,” in the words of American Institute of Physics director Henry A. Barton.35 The idea of holding such a meeting originated within the AIP Board of Governors, motivated by an uptick in efforts to form new APS divisions. The AIP board took up the matter of a group petitioning the APS for a division devoted to applied spectroscopy during its March 1944 meeting, considering whether the APS was the appropriate venue for such an organization and discussing what the AIP’s role should be in mediating such efforts in the future. The discussion moved from the particulars of the proposal to the general wisdom of supporting interest groups within the AIP member societies, which led to the even more abstract question of how deliberate organization of the physics community could be directed to the advantage of the field. Barton suggested that the National Research Council might have funds available to support a meeting discussing such questions.36 The hastily assembled conference convened at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia two months later, May 19–21, 1944, “for the purpose of discussing the present and postwar problems facing physics.”37 The problems singled out for attention included education from high school through the graduate level, the value and needs of industrial physicists, professional standards and the possibility of instituting discipline-wide accred-

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itation mechanisms, how to manage the relationship between physics and government during peacetime, and promotion of the value of physics to the American public. The conference was a premeditated effort to plot the professional contours of postwar physics, motivated by an optimistic slant on the ability physicists had to control their own destiny in the postwar world. The participants clearly appreciated, before the Second World War had ended, that the central importance of physics in the war effort presented an opportunity to increase the field’s peacetime profile as well. Since physicists were conspiring to structure their national profile, nationalist metaphors again emerged as the natural way to express their goals. Richard M. Sutton, secretary of the conference and a Haverford College physicist widely respected for his teaching, deployed the nation metaphor in his introductory remarks: As in an adjacent building here in Independence Square, wise men met to frame the Constitution of these United States, so we are in a sense met to frame the Constitution of Physics, perhaps I should say “The United States of Physics,” on such lines that future generations may acknowledge that we did our work well. Our purpose is to take some of the preliminary steps with the expectation that what we discuss here will, by the democratic workings of our various organizations, take root in the soil of our societies and contribute to the strength of our whole organism. . . . There is no question here of academic physicists vs. industrial physicists, or of experimentalists vs. theoretical physicists, and there has been a conscious effort made to have all sides of physics represented.38

In singling out those specific dichotomies, Sutton reinforced their importance, which, despite the conference’s egalitarian mission, was on display throughout. Sutton was nonetheless correct to note the broad representation at the gathering. Government physicists were in attendance, joining academic physicists from private and public research universities as well as small colleges. Representatives from such well-established industrial research institutions as AT&T’s Bell Laboratories participated alongside physicists from smaller industrial enterprises that were just beginning to dedicate substantial resources to research. Fragmentation was a growing fact of life, but the NRC meeting can be understood as a genuine attempt to bridge the gaps that divided American physicists. Its diversity affords a cross-section of views surrounding the future of physics, especially industrial physics, in the 1940s. The question driving the meeting was an existential one: what does it

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mean to be a physicist? Oliver E. Buckley of Bell Telephone Laboratories articulated common concerns that physics would be debased if it strayed too far from its defining ideals, which he understood in the conventional manner of the time as the orientation toward the formulation of general principles. Buckley identified the question of how “physicist” should be defined as key to postwar professional development and supported developing accreditation mechanisms for both institutions and individuals. He championed industry as a viable career path for physicists, but also cautioned that although the growth of physics in industry “is fine for the physicists and should lead to benefits for them,” it could only do so “if it does not at the same time so overpopularize the profession as to lead to its degradation.”39 Protecting prestige ranked alongside revamping education as a postwar goal for the majority of physicists, both academic and industrial. Buckley continued: “Many who are not physicists will see nourishment for themselves in adopting the title. Such a result would obviously be unfortunate, for it is only by restricting the use of the name physicist to those who ennoble it that these benefits can be made enduring.”40 Protecting physics as a prestigious appellation meant actively demarcating its responsibilities from those of other scientists and technicians, most notably chemists and engineers. Demarcation was especially important in industry, where physicists were usually not corralled within departmental structures that respected disciplinary integrity and needed to define how their responsibilities and their status differed from their collaborators within large research groups. Seconding Buckley’s advocacy of accreditation, Cornell’s Roswell C. Gibbs judged it “a mistake in making appointments to designate a physicist as an engineer or as a chemist even though it may be the easy way to secure approval of a new appointment by an Executive Board or Officer or to elicit favorable consideration from a Draft Board for an ‘essential man’ in the war effort.” Being accredited as a physicist, and properly referred to as such would, in Gibbs’s view produce “the effect upon the individual in maintaining his morale, in giving him a proper feeling of prestige, in developing a sense of belonging to a group with interests and points of view in common with [his] own, in promoting loyalty to the profession he has chosen, and in encouraging him to associate himself with suitable scientific organizations from which he will derive stimulation and other benefits and to the development of which he can direct his own efforts and support.”41 Gibbs’s anxiety was related to Buckley’s, but it was distinct in one meaningful respect: Buckley aimed to keep interlopers out of physics; Gibbs strove

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to keep credentialed physicists in. Whereas Buckley expressed concern that those who were not physicists would usurp the name, Gibbs sought to preempt the temptation some individuals might feel to adopt another name for the sake of expedience. Buckley worried that the status and prestige of physics would be diluted if the name were not controlled; Gibbs predicted that prestigious accomplishments might bolster the status of competing fields if physicists were not properly ensconced in a robust disciplinary structure. The concerns were not mutually exclusive, and both were relevant when considering the growth of industrial physics. The parallel impulse to police the boundary of physics from within and without also reflects a larger ambivalence about industry, which appeared in mid-1940s discussions about the future of physics as both a potential area for useful growth and as a threat to physicists’ traditional values. Harvard’s Edwin Kemble, one of the pioneers of American quantum theory, described both the opportunities and the dangers industry represented by setting out the challenges graduate education faced. He observed what was by then a widely accepted fact: “Greater emphasis on the industrial applications of physics will be necessary and desirable after the war is ended. Industry will need more physicists, and physicists will need industrial jobs.” Turning to the challenge of preparing graduate students for industrial posts while remaining true to traditional ideals of physics, Kemble continued: “We shall need to give more electronics, chemistry, metallurgy, and shop work. At the same time I, for one, should be very sorry to see anything like the conversion of graduate training into a glorified engineering course.”42 Kemble voiced a broader ambivalence with respect to the proper place of industrial physics. It was a growth area in the 1940s, offering abundant employment for physics PhDs, and its technological focus helped cement the social relevance of physics. Yet industrial work often did little to bolster the traditional ideals of physics. Kemble’s pejorative reference to engineering expressed the feeling many academic physicists shared that knowledge how remained less noble than knowledge why. Kemble’s stance illustrates an imbalance in the relationship between academia and industry. Although the industrial sector could boast faster growth and a larger population, all physicists, save the rare autodidact, were trained in an academic context. The path to protecting industrial interests therefore cut through academic territory. Building industrial concerns into the future of American physics meant convincing graduate advisers that students should be exposed to industrial problems, skills, and job opportunities. R. Bowling

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Barnes of the American Cyanamid Company noted that the place of the physicist in industry could only be realized more fully through attention to “the type of training that our future physicists are given.” Barnes foresaw “golden opportunities ahead for industrial physicists,” but cautioned that “to take advantage of these opportunities . . . and to make the best use of his knowledge of physics it will be imperative that he be able to speak and understand the language of his fellow scientists.”43 To this end, he supported broad training for physics students in the rudiments of general fields such as biology, chemistry, and geology, and also exposure to specific technological growth areas like rubber and petroleum. Barnes’s remarks stirred up considerable controversy. Several discussants, including Mervin Kelly of Bell Laboratories and other industrialists, argued that strong training in foundational skills and concepts outweighed broad exposure to other fields, even among applied physicists. The reaction against Barnes’s advocacy of what Kemble might have called “glorified engineering” indicates that although industrial physicists were keen to see their interests reflected in graduate training, they were hesitant to do so at the risk of ghettoizing themselves. Protecting industrial physicists, for most, did not mean tracking doctoral students into basic or applied subprograms; rather it meant, as Ralph A. Sawyer suggested, expanding the scope of necessary foundational training in physics to include fields such as geometrical optics and hydrodynamics.44 Effectively managing the impending growth of industrial physics was not just a matter graduate training, but also required organizational encouragement. G. P. Harnwell, having further developed his views on how postwar physics should be organized, observed in his address that “the needs that should be supplied by and for physicists have simply outgrown the existing organizational framework.” In fact, according to Harnwell: “There can scarcely be said to be at present any organization of physicists. The American Physical Society is not sufficient[ly] broadly based and representative; it is properly an exclusive rather than an inclusive society.” Harnwell repeated what had become a mantra, stating that “physics is a unified discipline dealing with matter and energy in all their forms and interactions,” continuing: “But this corpus of concern is so broad that the internal structure of the society must be braced with the beams and cross-ties of special interests.” Harnwell advocated a “horizontal and vertical divisional structure,” in which physicists could be represented both by institutional context and topical interest, which he felt would allow society to better organize meetings and

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distribute publications such that they would reach the greatest number of interested readers. Similar discontent with the narrow goals of the APS was widespread and Harnwell’s idea of an inclusive umbrella organization was one prominent solution under consideration.45 The notion that physics should be reimagined under a new, broader framework was not universally beloved, however. Although Harnwell’s talk won support from industrial physicists who felt that an expansively conceived society would better fit their needs, it also met pointed criticism. Harvey Fletcher, then of Bell Labs, opened the discussion with the complaint, “Dr. Harnwell’s thesis would seem to indicate that we have done wrong in forming the Chemical Society, the Astronomical Society, the Physical Society, and others, as we have grown from the original Philosophical Society into these branches.”46 Fletcher would later serve as president of the APS, but he spoke at the NRC with his feet firmly planted in the Acoustical Society, and suggested from this standpoint that fragmentation was a natural and unavoidable by-product of growth. Mervin Kelly, also of Bell, suggested that Harnwell was indulging utopian fantasies and that it was more pragmatic to work with the APS as it existed rather than attempting to craft a new, suitably complete, large-scale edifice. Karl Darrow, the APS secretary, seconded this view, suggesting that the scheme for divisions that APS was just beginning to implement be given a chance to work before the physics community considered subjecting itself to sweeping changes.47 Together, these voices favored allowing the organic processes of institution building to work before considering unilateral, topdown action. Following the airing of a range of proposals favoring large structural changes, which were suffused with the same optimism about the capacity of physicists to shape their fate that motivated the congress, the meeting ended on a conservative note. Karl Darrow, commenting on the dubious likelihood that many of the proposed actions could be implemented in an orderly fashion, remarked: “I am reminded of the old story of the mice who decided to bell the cat. It seems that in this case the American Institute of Physics has been invited to bell the cat.”48 Darrow’s quietist conclusion about restructuring was perhaps somewhat disingenuous, in that it conveniently aligned with his conviction that the APS was adequately equipped to handle the pressures of postwar demographic changes and that its more limited understanding of physics should be protected. But despite the failure of the likes of Darrow to come around to the view that the organizations of American physics required

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substantial restructuring, the NRC conference generated momentum for those seeking to implement such reforms, and the following few years would indeed visit significant change upon both the AIP and the APS. REORGANIZING PHYSICS

Following on the heels of the NRC conference, the AIP formed a Policy Committee on the Reorganization of Physics to distill the range of opinions hashed out at the meeting into a set of recommendations. The committee, chaired by John Tate, included many who were sympathetic to the federalist view, including Harnwell, Gibbs, and Buckley.49 The premise from which the committee began was that changes in the nature and composition of American physics since the formation of the AIP necessitated reevaluating its core responsibilities. The foremost change they identified was the fact that “interest in the science of physics is now much more widespread than formerly. It is no longer so much concentrated in academic circles and extends into a host of industries and into the border ground of other sciences. The number of academic, institutional, and industrial workers who identify themselves with physics has approximately doubled in the past decade, and the post-war era promises a much greater expansion.”50 The committee acknowledged that it drew the boundaries of physics broadly enough that it would likely embrace many people otherwise classified as chemists, engineers, and metallurgists, but nevertheless insisted that recognizing the interest such researchers maintained in physics was necessary for the health of the community. The proposal for reorganization became the template for a new AIP constitution, adopted in February 1946. It reflected the federalist sympathies of the committee and fell in line with an understanding that physics needed to be organized to reflect what physicists did. The AIP would continue its publishing responsibilities, and would add a new category of individual membership, which would be extended automatically to individual members of AIP member societies, but which could also be acquired by joining the AIP directly as an associate member. The AIP dropped this membership category shortly thereafter, but its inclusion in the initial version of the new constitution speaks to the evolved role the organization envisioned for itself. Also rolled into the AIP’s new mission was the publication of a true general interest journal, which would provide a venue for any physicist to publish work that was interesting and accessible to a wide array of colleagues, and which would in some measure counteract the topical specialization of physics. That proposal would lead to the establishment of Physics Today in 1948.

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The new AIP constitution provided the apparatus necessary to permit something akin to Harnwell’s vision to come to pass. The AIP, however, never grew into a society to which physicists felt any allegiance. The APS, which had the most to lose if the AIP succeeded in expanding its mission, finally made concessions to the groups of industrial and applied researchers who had been agitating for greater representation. By mid-1945, two divisions had managed to navigate through the APS council and receive official recognition, the Division of Electron and Ion Optics and the Division of High Polymer Physics. But as more proposals reached the council, requesting representation for industrial physics, physics and aviation, chemical physics, spectroscopy, and other specialties, the council balked. The very name “division” embodied everything figures like Darrow feared in the specter of specialization. At its May 5 meeting, the APS council placed a moratorium on the formation of new divisions, pending the resolution of outstanding reorganization efforts, including those at the AIP. The vast changes in the status and purpose of physics that marked the early post–Second World War period are often cast as brought about by distinctive Cold War pressures and incentives. But the institutional machinations that laid the groundwork for those changes were under way before the Second World War came to a close. The most important prerequisites that led to the reconfiguration of American physics were negotiated through the early 1940s and had imposed themselves on the infrastructure of American physics before the most salient features of the Cold War context—the federal funding environment, virulent anticommunism, and the cloud of nuclear fear, in particular—came into focus.51 These changes could only come about because some physicists came to think of their field as the sum of what physicists did. As William A. Wildhack, a National Bureau of Standards physicist, wrote to support the idea of a general, AIP-like organization to replace the APS: “The policies of the new AIP should be framed on the realization that its aims can be achieved only by widespread and active membership support, and that this support can be retained only by an organization which is as much concerned with service to scientists as with service to science.”52 The locus of professional power did not shift fully to the AIP, as some hoped, but the new prevalence of this way of thinking did spur institutional change. Late in 1946, the APS council again turned its attention to the question of divisions, this time with knowledge of the AIP’s plans. On September 19, the council approved an official policy regarding divisions, composed of five points:

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1. The Society shall continue the policy of establishing and supporting Divisions as provided for in the constitution. 2. All members of Divisions shall be Members or Fellows of the Society. 3. In the Division now enrolling Associate Members, these shall be permitted to continue in their present status until the reorganization of the American Institute of Physics makes provision for individual members. 4. Any member of the Society may enroll in a Division on payment to the Society of an initiation fee of two dollars. 5. Divisional expenses considered normal by the Council shall be met by the Society, and no divisional dues may be collected or assessed by a Division unless authorized by the Council.53

The policy, especially points (2) and (3), was designed to prevent divisions from bleeding outside the bounds of the APS and thereby to reinforce the society’s control over the scope and character of the discipline. Divisions allowed groups with interests that were not traditionally represented by the APS to build space for themselves within it, as long as they submitted to the authority of the larger society. By allowing an expanded program of division formation, albeit grudgingly, the APS shored up what authority it retained to shape the definition of physics, forestalling somewhat Harnwell’s federalist vision. That is not to say that efforts to expand the scope of physics failed. The end of the moratorium on division formation opened the door to a new division that would rapidly become the society’s largest and most influential, while embodying many of the principles Harnwell defended: the Division of Solid State Physics.

3 BALKANIZING PHYSICS

When we sit on the lawn of the Bureau of Standards, we do not want to feel “qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.” —JOHN H. VAN VLECK, 1944

Like the transistor or the microwave oven, solid state physics was itself an industrial innovation. Physical investigation of the properties of solid matter could boast a long tradition by the 1940s, but solid state physics only became a distinct professional entity in the United States upon the founding of the American Physical Society’s Division of Solid State Physics (DSSP) in 1947. The DSSP emerged from the institutional machinations explored in the previous chapter, in which industrial physicists struggled for a greater role in the community while traditionalists defended a more restrictive and conceptually purer vision of physics. The DSSP resulted from an effort spearheaded by industrial physicists, which aimed to negotiate between these competing views of how the post–Second World War physics community should be unified. The qualitative and quantitative growth of American physics disrupted traditional modes of institutional governance and notions of professional identity. Topical divisions of the American Physical Society (APS) emerged as the preferred salve for destabilizing expansion. Divisions gave smaller interest groups an institutional outlet while also keeping them under the aegis of the APS, which defined and enforced professional norms more strictly than a looser alliance could. The DSSP, as well as responding to an uptick in interest in the physics of solids, can be understood as an attempt to enact an inclusive, outward-looking identity for physics, contrasting traditional notions of what

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a physicist was, within the institutional constraints and opportunities of the mid-1940s. Spencer Weart describes the process through which solid state physics formed, noting: “When we speak of the emergence of solid-state physics . . . we do not mean the creation of something de novo. We mean a grand rearrangement of an entire array of specialties, old and new, into a novel constellation.” Weart identifies the idiosyncrasies that characterized the development of solid state physics, a field that broke the rules of discipline formation followed by its sibling subfields, such as nuclear physics. Rather than growing from a seed, Weart observes, specialties sometimes “rearrange themselves into fields at a single time when conditions reach some critical point.”1 The lesson Weart draws from the formation of solid state physics is that “a few thoughtful people were able to sway the balance in favor of a community that was intellectually and socially open, yet internally coherent—a solid-state physics community.”2 Examining the physics community in the 1930s, he finds “no clear tendency to unify around the general subject of solids,” but that, even so, “there was indeed a unifying force. . . . This force was the growing intellectual unity of the subject. Solid-state physics could become an intellectual community only after its cognitive parts had drawn together in the minds of some physicists.” He suggests that a “‘unified theory’ had been created through the coming of quantum mechanics,” and identifies the “intellectual unity offered by the concept of a solid,” as a force working in favor of solid state’s cohesion.3 This chapter revisits the story of solid state physics’ founding with the goal of suggesting that the unity the solid state synthesis supported, although powerful and effective at managing the rising tide of specialization, was somewhat less than conceptually coherent. The quantum mechanical approach to crystalline solids that had emerged by the 1940s was indeed unified and coherent, but it was not the whole of solid state physics. The distinctive institutional rearrangement that produced the larger solid state community, including at the outset a number of research traditions beside the one focused on the quantum mechanics of regular solids, reflected ongoing debates about the identity of American physics. In that sense, solid state was a political alliance rather than a conceptually unified community. It was internally heterogeneous and quickly became fractious. Although the possibilities opened up by the application of quantum techniques to solids were a critical antecedent for the rise of solid state physics, another equally important precursor was an ideological shift that made it possible for American physicists to conceive

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of a subfield defined by professional and institutional objectives. Solid state physics, although its founders strove for unity, was not defined by the same type of unity beloved of other areas of physics. Some of the research programs that made up solid state physics were indeed conceptually coherent, but focusing on the unity within these areas, which often were part of traditions dating to before the quantum revolution, neglects the role of political unity in providing what little cohesion the field as whole possessed. Analyzing solid state as a fractious constellation, bound into a loose alliance in the service of common professional goals, clarifies the reasons for its formation, the characteristics of its evolution through the Cold War decades, and ultimately, as discussed in later chapters, its role in the eventual formation of new categories, such as condensed matter physics and materials science. The story of the DSSP’s origins, therefore, tells not just how one of the most important provinces of Cold War physics established itself, but how a new sense of identity for American physicists, one that embraced applications, interdisciplinary exchange, and industrial relevance, became possible. MAKING DIVISIONS

The founding of the Division of Solid State Physics was a circuitous affair, lasting almost four turbulent years straddling the end of the Second World War. The idea for an APS division that would cater to an inclusive cross section of industrial and academic researchers interested in some aspect or another of the physics of solids began to germinate in November 1943 in Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University hosted an APS meeting that included a symposium on the physics of rubber. One purpose of the symposium was to discuss a petition that had been circulated earlier in the year, garnering thirty-one signatures, in support of a division representing the physics of high-polymeric materials. The industrial lineage of this division is clear from its originally prosed title: Division of Textile Physics. The more highbrow reference to high polymers was adopted to mollify the APS council and its prejudice for subject-based divisions. On the power of the Evanston petition and the verbal support expressed at the meeting, the APS council authorized the Division of High-Polymer Physics, the society’s second.4 Roman Smoluchowski (figure 3.1), a General Electric (GE) research physicist, was in attendance. Smoluchowski had come to the United States from Poland, fleeing German occupation, a few years earlier. In Warsaw he had led the department of the physics of metals, and the rubber symposium

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Figure 3.1. Roman Smoluchowski in the General Electric Research Laboratory, ca. 1944. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, courtesy of Roman Smoluchowski

emboldened him to launch a similar effort on behalf of his preferred class of materials. Before the year was out, Smoluchowski had recruited five other physicists with an interest in metals research to advocate for an APS division of metals physics. This “group of six,” so named by Karl K. Darrow, was strong on industrial researchers. It included Smoluchowski’s GE colleague Saul Dushman, along with Sidney Siegel (Westinghouse) and William Shockley (Bell Labs). It included one representative each from the academic and industrial sectors. Frederick Seitz of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, who represented the academy, had previous industrial experience, having worked at General Electric from 1937 to 1939. Thomas A. Read of Frankford Arsenal, representing the public sector, had been a Westinghouse Research Fellow from 1939 to 1941. The group of six signed their names to a letter

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Smoluchowski wrote entitled “The Present War Is a Physicist’s War,” which asked “metal physicists” to weigh in on two questions: “First, do you think that some sort of a cooperation among metal-physicists is necessary and advisable or not; and second, what form this cooperation should take: a small committee, a section of The Physical Society, or something else maybe?”5 The group of six distributed the letter to fifty-three of their colleagues nationwide who had a research interest in metals, which, in Smoluchowski’s judgment, promised rapid postwar growth “not only from the point of view of fundamental science, but also from the point of view of practical problems in industry.”6 He chose “metals” both because industrial researchers worked primarily with metallic substances and because it implied a willingness to collaborate with metallurgists, much as he did in his day-to-day work at General Electric.7 Collaboration outside of physics was central to Smoluchowski’s vision and he resisted other names on the grounds that “cooperation from purely metallurgical quarters may be more active if we are ‘all out for metals.’”8 Metal physics proved more fractious than polymer physics and the letter elicited mixed responses. The most pointed opposition came from John H. Van Vleck, by then ensconced at Harvard University and heading the theory group of the Radio Research Laboratory, which pursued wartime research into radar countermeasures. Van Vleck, in his reply, wrote, “I must confess that I am a rather violent opponent of what I like to call ‘Balkanization’ of the American Physical Society, be it either geographical or by subject matter.” Van Vleck praised “the spirit of a Quaker meeting” that characterized prewar meetings, at which “one can go to hear the papers, in case one is interested, or sit on the lawn and talk to one’s friends, in case one is not,” and where “anybody who wants to can give a ten-minute paper on any subject having even the remotest connection with physics.”9 An essay Darrow wrote for Physics Today in 1951 also references the tradition of fleeing to the outdoors during APS meetings. By way of giving physicists advice on how to deliver a paper, Darrow suggested that familiar dry monotone of most APS talks was in part responsible for chasing attendees to the lawn, noting “the popularity of the saying that when a meeting of the American Physical Society is going on, the members are in the corridors or on the lawn instead of listening to the speakers” (figure 3.2). Physicists could learn something from stage actors: “People with tickets to South Pacific are not standing around in Forty-fourth street when the curtain is up.”10

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Figure 3.2. Karl Darrow (left) chats with Henry Barton, American Institute of Physics director from 1931 to 1957, outdoors during an American Physical Society meeting in Washington, DC, 1960. Credit: Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, American Institute of Physics, Physics Today Collection

Van Vleck further criticized plans for a new division on the grounds that it would pollute APS meetings with nonphysicists: “The idea that various groups whose main interest is not physics must be coddled, in order to make them members of the American Physical Society, has never appealed to me, as just mere numbers is not everything. The American Chemical Society is, to my mind, a prime example of this point. It seems to me that the continual tendency to section the Physical Society and establish a lot of suborganizations will tend to put it on what I may term a ritualistic and/or new-deal-bureaucratic basis.”11 Van Vleck favored an informal environment, unencumbered by substructures. He worried further that divisions, if they maintained their own membership, would harbor interlopers who had special interest in the subject the division represented—metals, for instance—but had no inclination to consider questions that were characteristic of physics as he understood it, as the search for generalizable laws. Opposition of this character was consistent with the view of the APS as a pure research organi-

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zation. Van Vleck, through his foundational work on the quantum theory of magnetism, had contributed much to the physics of metals but was interested in them only insofar as they provided test systems for foundational principles.12 By “groups whose main interest is not physics,” Van Vleck meant not just chemists, metallurgists, and engineers, but applied researchers whose interest in applications cast doubt on their commitment to pure physics. Van Vleck’s opposition to a division represented a minority of the metals physicists polled, but that minority exerted outsized influence. Among the founders of the American theoretical physics community, Van Vleck held an exalted place. He was one of the few Americans to participate actively in the quantum revolution of the 1920s, and this inspired veneration sufficient to lend his opinions considerable weight.13 He was a good friend of APS secretary Karl Darrow, who was responsible for overseeing the formation of new divisions.14 No decisive evidence shows Van Vleck exerting direct influence on the division-formation process through Darrow, but their frequent correspondence gave Van Vleck repeated opportunities to reiterate his distaste for the carving up of the APS into interest groups, and his expression of such opposition predated Smoluchowski’s proposal. Upon receiving a survey regarding the Division of Electron and Ion Optics, for example, Van Vleck wrote to Darrow: In reply to your questionaire [sic], I do not wish to be enrolled in the electron microscope division of the Physical Society. Apparently we are now to have vertical as well as horizontal Balkanization of the American Physical Society. I enclose herewith a copy of the Constitution that I ran across in my files. Apparently it is the original form written by our wise forefathers at Independence Hall, before any new deal amendments. It seems to carry no provisions for either type of Balkanization, or entering into the real estate business. Are you sure that all these items are legal?15

Article IX, which added a provision for topical divisions in 1931, would not have appeared in an original version of the APS constitution. Given Van Vleck’s standing, his persistence, and their close relationship, the way Darrow dealt with proposed divisions likely owed something to Van Vleck’s objections. Smoluchowski took pains commensurate with Van Vleck’s stature to assuage his concerns. He aimed to skirt both of Van Vleck’s objections while still acknowledging their validity and demonstrating deference: “Everybody, I think, will agree that ‘Balkanization’ of the American Physical Society would

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be very undesirable,” he wrote in response to Van Vleck’s skepticism about the group of six’s proposal: “What some of us consider worthwhile is (if I may use your political analogy) an attempt to prevent ‘an invasion and partition by powerful neighbors’ (i.e. chemists and metallurgists) at the same time avoiding the dangers of specialization. I do hope that if such a group is created it will not interfere with the democratic spirit of the meetings of the Society which all of us enjoy so much.”16 Van Vleck, unappeased, extended the political analogy, describing Smoluchowski’s stance as “a little like the idea of Germany before 1914 that if it did not expand, it would be gobbled up by Russia and France. As far as I can see, the Physical Society is a going concern, and its membership list is not shrinking.” His hesitancy about opening the door of the APS too widely rested on a concern “that our meetings will have too many hangers-on whose main interest is not that of pure physics or science. When we sit on the lawn of the Bureau of Standards, we do not want to feel ‘qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.’”17 Van Vleck emphasized what Smoluchowski had missed in his first reply: his concern was not that chemists and metallurgists would infiltrate the APS, but that expanding the scope of the APS beyond its traditional focus on pure physics would rob it of its intellectual integrity and social intimacy. Van Vleck, a physicist before he was a scientist or a theorist or a metals researcher, cast his lot with those who felt similar allegiance to physics as a cohesive intellectual enterprise. Smoluchowski, resigned to Van Vleck’s opposition, replied only that he did not anticipate that the type of organization he had in mind, directed mostly toward organizing special symposia at APS meetings, would undermine the Quaker spirit of those meetings.18 Van Vleck and other opponents of divisions made more successful entreaties to Frederick Seitz, who was more favorably disposed to view the APS as a haven for pure researchers. In early May 1944, while the group of six was in the process of organizing a petition to the APS council for a metals division, Seitz wrote to Darrow suggesting that the question of new division be postponed until after the war. He explained his suggestion by referencing conversations he had conducted with opponents of the division: “These are men whose opinions I respect very much, and I was impressed with the fact that they feel as if divisionalization will be a catastrophe.”19 Darrow was puzzled by Seitz’s effort to undermine the group of six’s petition, replying, “I am not sure whether this is a definite withdrawal of the request by your group for a Division of Metal Physics, but since the Council has no formal petition for such a division before it, it has not yet taken action about such a division nor

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is it likely to.”20 Darrow expressed his conviction that further subdivisions of the APS were inevitable, and that the process was essential as the society grew and required additional structures to handle practical matters such as organizing meetings and symposia. Seitz, an astute politician with a finger ever in the wind, appeared relieved that Darrow had drawn him back from the skeptical brink, replying: You have put the entire situation in a light that makes me feel much clearer about the objectives at hand. As you undoubtedly gathered from my previous letter, I have been subject to considerable bombardment from many hands concerning the part I had played in connection with the proposal to start a division of “Metal Physics.” I now realize that divisionalization is not an evil in itself, and that the success or failure of the American Physical Society in the future depends entirely upon the way in which the members exercise the rights that they have under the existing organization.21

The proposal for a new division would proceed, despite the opposition. FROM METALS PHYSICS TO SOLID STATE PHYSICS

Darrow recognized the growth of divisions as inevitable, but in deference to Van Vleck and other traditionalists held fast to the interpretation of the APS constitution that required divisions to form around subject areas—the source of his resistance to proposals for a division of industrial physics. He sought to bridge the ideological divide by recommending that the group of six pursue a solid state physics division, rather than a metals physics division, which mitigated Van Vleck’s objections somewhat while still giving Smoluchowski’s energetic group the institutional space they craved.22 Seitz was swayed by Darrow’s suggestion that the proposal for a metals division be broadened to encompass solids generally. He offered a mea culpa to Smoluchowski for wavering in his conviction while being “bombarded very heavily with views against divisionalization” before asking: “Do you have a deep-seated objection to using the name ‘Division on the Physics of Solids?’ This would undoubtedly open the doors to a much wider group, such as those interested in pigments and ceramics, and would make the aspects of divisionalization a little less grim.”23 The discussion over whether to organize around metals or solids cut to the core of the disagreements over the proposed division’s mission. Léon Brillouin, an expert on the quantum theory of crystals who had fled France for the United States at the beginning of the Second World War, expressed the

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heart of the opposition to metals as a subject category in his reply to the group of six’s letter: “The distinction between metals and other solids has no scientific basis and is only a matter of engineering—The physicist cannot draw a border between the two cases, and most of our recent knowledge of metals was the result of experiments and theories worked out on the non metallic crystals. So let us speak of Physics of solids in general.”24 From the perspective of basic physics, the solid state was the superior category because it did a better—if imperfect—job of preserving topical coherence within the division. In contrast, the choice of metals as an organizing principle betrayed too starkly the industrial origins of the original proposal. Smoluchowski, responding to Sidney Siegel’s suggestion that the entire solid state be considered, reported hearing “the opinion that most industrial research is done in the domain of metals,” although he admitted that he could not be sure himself.25 It took considerable persuasion before Smoluchowski would accept solids over metals as the focus of the new division. Despite his deference to Van Vleck’s concerns and the pains he took to emphasize that the division was motivated by the best interest of physics and physics alone, one of his driving motivations was collaboration with chemists and metallurgists, which he took to be essential to the health of physics. He envisioned an organization that would keep the study of metals tied closely to physics, but also saw it as a tool to organize joint symposia with societies such as the American Society for Metals (ASM) and the American Institute of Mechanical Engineers (AIME). Smoluchowski did have good reason to emphasize the collaborative potential with these societies. Metallurgy before the Second World War had aspirations to improve its standing among the sciences. When the University of Pennsylvania was working to expand its research profile in the late 1930s, for instance, metallurgy was one area it identified as offering a substantial return on investment. Gaylord P. Harnwell, recently appointed chair of the physics department, attempted to poach metallurgist Gerhard Derge from Carnegie Tech, noting that “a number of alumni and interested friends of the University have proposed that the interest in Metallurgy be expanded,” and emphasizing “a complete unanimity of opinion among us that the graduate and research aspect of the development should be conceived of as a pure scientific program in the Physics and Chemistry of solids rather than endeavoring to tie it too closely to classical empirical metallurgy.”26 Further, metallurgy programs and industries focused around research into the properties of metals were hiring physicists. In the National Research Council’s 1946 survey of US industrial laboratories, only one, Bell Tele-

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phone Laboratories, listed “solid state” as a research area.27 In the same volume, references to metals, alloys, steel, metallurgy, and similar terms appear on almost every page and in the entries for the great majority of laboratories that list physicists among their research staff. Smoluchowski’s sense that metals were central to the work of industrial physicists was not misplaced. But similar data indicate that he need not have been so concerned about the exact name of the field. Only a handful of laboratories in the 1950 edition of the same report list solid state physics among their research areas or solid state physicists among their staff, but by 1956 the term was in common circulation and in 1960 it was ubiquitous.28 Smoluchowski eventually relented. He wrote Seitz at the end of May 1944: “I quite agree that from the point of view of the A.P.S. as a whole ‘solids’ are to be preferred, but I think that from the point of view of cooperation with other societies, ‘Metals’ are more appropriate. This cooperation and this bridging of the gap between metal physicists and metallurgists is to my mind one of our main objectives.”29 Seitz replied on June 14: Regarding the title of the division, I honestly do not believe that we should worry about what the metallurgists would consider a good title. From the experience I had in Pennsylvania with organizing cooperative meetings, I believe I can state honestly that the cooperation with the metallurgists will have to originate on our side. If there are joint meetings with the ASM or the [AIME], it will be because someone like you or I has been aggressive enough to approach them. The exact name of the division will not play a role in this negotiation. As a result, I still hardly favor the use of the word “solid” instead of the word “metal.” In addition, I think we should remember that the persons interested in pigments, glass, and the like, who will be interested in the division, are very large in number, and are no less organized than the metallurgists. I believe it would be a mistake if we expressed interest in one of these groups, to the exclusion of the other.30

Seitz had been an assistant professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1930s during Harnwell’s efforts to expand the institution’s profile in metallurgy. The work Seitz was pursuing on solids had been a critical element of Harnwell’s sales pitch to potential hires, so Seitz would have had ample opportunity to develop a considered position on the relationship between physics and metallurgy. Seitz’s influence paved the way for Smoluchowski to finally abandon his commitment to metals. When Smoluchowski met with Darrow two days later on June 16, the result was an agreement to

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circulate a petition for the formation of a representational organ for physics of the solid state and to arrange a symposium to discuss the state of the field and plan future organizational efforts.31 The shift from metals to the solid state did not dampen Smoluchowski’s enthusiasm for ensuring that the growth of new fields of inquiry, especially those with industrial relevance, remained linked to the APS. The name change quelled some opposition from those who insisted on topical divisions or none at all, but the proposed DSSP, as demonstrated by subsequent events, remained an effort to integrate industrial researchers with the academic community by seeking a closer association between self-identified pure and applied researchers. FOUNDING THE DIVISION OF SOLID STATE PHYSICS

The question of what sort of organization should be established had remained in the background up to this point. It became central to the discussion after Smoluchowski and Darrow agreed to move ahead with the proposal for a solid state division. The group of six’s original letter had asked whether a fullfledged division or a smaller standing committee would be more favorable. In June 1944, the APS council appointed the group of six as a committee to organize a symposium at which the question would be put to a group of interested physicists.32 To this end, the group of six published the results of their survey in the Journal of Applied Physics with a one-page statement entitled “Physics of the Solid State.” This published statement gave a softer pitch than “The Present War Is a Physicist’s War,” but advanced essentially the same argument and raised essentially the same questions.33 Rather than advocating for new organizations, the statement plainly presented the range of options available and advertised the symposium, to be held at the January 1945 meeting of the APS in New York, at which they would be hashed out. Alongside the possibility of a new division, the article outlined the option of forming a standing committee within the APS, which, although it would require modification of the APS constitution to allow for such entities, would not maintain membership rolls and would thus make less of an impact on the identity and allegiance of individual physicists. The statement recognized among the community of solids researchers “a desire to avoid, as much as practical, too formal an organization,” and noted that avoiding divisionalization would skirt “the dangers of overspecialization and [stress] the unity of interest and of purpose of all physicists.”34 Such dainty rhetoric sought to defang the likes of Van Vleck, while recognizing the fact

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that solid state was such a large category and that institutionally reifying it would group together physicists who otherwise had little in common. The group of six spent the fall and winter of 1944 organizing a symposium for the January APS meeting. They took pains to balance institutional affiliations of the participants, their stated positions on divisions, as well as theoretical, experimental, and applied research. Van Vleck, for example, agreed to speak on the theory of ferromagnetism on the condition that his participation would not be presented as an endorsement of Balkanization.35 The Journal of Applied Physics, in which the statement announcing the symposium was published, was both a preferred outlet for industrial researchers and one of the few publications where a good balance of industrial and academic contributions was in evidence.36 The venue of publication and makeup of the symposium indicated that this new field would aim to bridge the divide between academic and industrial communities while also including an applied constituency that had previously had little say in APS affairs. From an organizational standpoint, the symposium resulted in a shortterm stalemate. Featuring voices both for and against a division, the symposium, like the circular letter before it, produced an overall preference for a committee rather than a division. Smoluchowski wrote to Van Vleck following the symposium: “My own feelings are quite optimistic now: I hope we will be able to have a ‘solid’ committee acting according to our original plans, avoiding at the same time the dangers of ‘pressure groups’ and other drawbacks which you have mentioned.”37 This sentiment expressed the broad consensus that the needs of the inchoate solid state community could be met by either appointing or electing a committee to organize meetings and symposia. The committee would have no permanent membership and collect no dues. Van Vleck used the attention the symposium generated to consolidate opposition to divisions. He proposed a prophylactic measure against further division-making—a standing Committee on Programs within the APS that would have representation from a range of subject areas and hold the responsibility for organizing meetings so as to benefit each. A petition, addressed to Darrow and signed by Van Vleck and a number of his like-minded colleagues, argued: “It is preferable to have a committee of the Society on the whole subject of symposia rather than a separate committee for each special field, for two reasons: In the first place, the danger of catering to pressure groups would be avoided, and in the second place, there would be furnished a better safeguard that the number of symposia would be neither excessively

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large nor too small.”38 Smoluchowski and the group of six endeavored to work with Van Vleck on this proposal. Upon receiving a copy of Van Vleck’s letter, Smoluchowski replied: “I see no reason why each group of physicists representing a definite broad field should not elect one or two men to your General Symposium Committee which would serve as outlined in your letter. However, I do think these men should be elected, not appointed.”39 Smoluchowski was concerned that younger physicists felt alienated from the society’s systems of governance and would benefit from an organizational structure that encouraged them to participate more fully in society business. In the absence of a committee or a division dedicated to solids, Smoluchowski insisted on elections to determine the constitution of any general committee in order to ensure that the system was not oligarchical. Van Vleck, in keeping with his preference for informality, found such democratic machinery distasteful. He considered contested elections a source of ill will and uncontested elections pointless formalities.40 Although Smoluchowski and Van Vleck had come closer to agreeing on a sequence of practical measures, their core disagreement about how the society should operate persisted. Van Vleck preferred a small society, conceptually unified and focused closely on pure research, which would organically produce the individuals willing and able to conduct the committee work necessary to arrange meetings. Smoluchowski, on the other hand, saw a need to introduce institutional apparatus in the society in order to achieve his aims. Seitz pointed out another consequence of Van Vleck’s plan, writing to Smoluchowski, “I believe that a large number of individuals whose primary interest is in applied physics will still be disgruntled.”41 Seitz foresaw steep postwar growth in industrial employment of physicists and suggested that, if steps could not be made to address their needs within the Physical Society, a separate society for applied physics be established. Nonetheless, he agreed to support Smoluchowski’s proposal, which would combine basic and applied work within the solid state division.42 Seitz’s conviction that applied physicists would be dissatisfied by a general program committee is indicative of the widespread acknowledgment that industrial and applied physicists generally favored more, rather than less structure within the APS. These discussions were ultimately academic. Efforts to organize a committee, either topical or general, were thwarted by a constitutional technicality; provisions for standing committees did not exist in the APS constitution. Since the purpose of APS divisions, as already in practice by the Division of High-Polymer Physics and the Division of Electron and Ion Optics, closely

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mirrored the proposed functions of the solid state committee and of the general program committee, Darrow and the APS council deemed that an amendment to the constitution in order to allow standing committees was unjustified. The group of six shelved their efforts until the end of the war, when physicists were less encumbered by war work and travel restrictions and the political maneuvering required to marshal enough support for the solid state division would be simpler. Their effort was resurrected late in 1946, after the APS council lifted its moratorium on new divisions. Amid the controversy surrounding the wisdom of divisions, the APS council had appointed a committee, headed by Edward Uhler Condon, to study the issue and craft a more permanent policy.43 At the same time, “Authorization was . . . obtained to tell the ‘Group of Six,’ who want to organize a Division of the Solid State, to go ahead with their plan.”44 This by no means represented an end to the debate over the role of divisions. At the next meeting, Condon’s committee conferred with the council, with the result “that both the Committee and the council found themselves confronted with irreconcilable viewpoints, and the matter has to go over to the January meeting.”45 Substantial progress would have to wait until May of the following year, when the council again, in Darrow’s sardonic paraphrase, “turned to its favorite pastime of discussing the question of Divisions.”46 Delegates from the Division of Electron and Ion Optics and the Division of High-Polymer Physics complained about the council’s heavy-handed approach to crafting policies curtailing their activities. Divisional representatives had been excluded from the committee that drafted the society’s policy regarding divisions, and as a result they found their bylaws, and the activities permitted by them, abruptly constrained. The society clamped down on the practice of divisions granting associate memberships to individuals who were not APS members and prohibited divisions from collecting their own dues. Darrow reported that “the Divisions felt themselves completely at sea owing to the authority possessed by the Council to make such changes without consultation with Divisional officers.”47 The reaction prompted the council to allow representatives from the divisions to take part in any future discussions pertinent to divisional activities, but refused to forestall implementing the policy it had adopted. Darrow reported the resolution: “The President shall appoint a committee of five members of the Council to study the relations between the Divisions and the Council necessary to implement the policy adopted in September 1946. (The [emphasized] phrase is an essential part of this motion: sugges-

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tions that it be deleted were made, but did not eventuate in any amendment of the motion).”48 The council, in other words, reasserted central authority over the divisions. The 1946 policy was designed to ensure that divisional activities would be governed by the APS, rather than promoting narrower interest groups. The council was particularly determined to restrict divisional membership to APS members. It ruled: “The Division of High-Polymer Physics may keep its present Associates indefinitely, but neither it nor any other Division may elect Associates henceforward,” and further required that “the By-Laws of the two elder Divisions shall be examined and brought into conformity” with the rules the council had set out.49 The council’s active policing of any activities that might threaten the social and conceptual cohesion of the society or usurp authority over membership or fees failed to deter the DSSP’s boosters. The day after getting the go-ahead from the society, Smoluchowski—who had moved from GE to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the fall of 1946—wrote to the council: “In view of the recent favorable decision of the Committee on Divisions (under the chairmanship of Dr. Fletcher) and the return of more normal conditions the ‘group of six’ requests the Council to consider again its petition and to approve a Division of Solid State in accord with the recommendations of the Committee on Divisions.”50 Just over a month later, at the November 30 council meeting, the formation of a “Division of Solid-State Physics” was authorized.51 Its status was officially recognized at the June 1947 APS meeting in Montreal.52 An announcement to the APS membership defined the DSSP’s scope “to comprise all theory and experimental research pertaining to the physics of the solid state, such as metals, insulators, phosphors, all crystalline substances, etc.”53 Metals had been substantially downgraded in the division’s mission, but although the expansion of scope made for an entity with slightly less fuzzy conceptual boundaries, it also created opportunities for it to encompass all styles of research, old and new, pure and applied. Adopting the solid state as a demarcating line did not draw sharp conceptual distinctions as much as it avoided them entirely. By compromising between the society’s demand for topical continuity and the desire to represent industrial and applied physicists equally, the DSSP became a big tent. The DSSP, and the loose community of physicists it represented, can be seen as a disciplinary experiment. The proposal for a metals division exposed several growing rifts within the physics community. As industry was becoming a considerable force in American physics, the rift between academia and industry grew into a matter of deeper concern. Two incompatible concep-

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tions of unity emerged in the face of questions about how physicists should position themselves following the war. The first followed directly from the traditional view that physics should be a field dedicated to pure science. Unity in this sense, of a field defined by the object of its study, derived its meaning from the basic concepts that were supposed to correspond to natural categories. Unity in the second sense was political. It embodied the idea that a community could come together for a common purpose from far-flung provinces as long as it was guided by a strong central organization. This type of unity, in contrast to conceptual unity, required continual institutional maintenance. American solid state physics, in the process of navigating these rifts, organized physicists not on the basis of shared techniques or conceptual tools, but by professional entente. It was a category imposed on a group of physicists who had a shared interest, but this interest was not in an encapsulated realm of physical inquiry; it was in bridging an institutional gap and creating organizational representation for groups that were otherwise marginalized. The question of how unity should be understood lay at the core of this development. THE POLITICAL UNITY OF SOLID STATE PHYSICS

Both those proposing the DSSP and those opposing it, those pushing for greater influence for applied physics and those seeking to protect the primacy of pure research, pledged allegiance to the unity of physics. They disagreed about what it meant for physics to be unified. Solid state physics embodied a political view of unity. Unlike the view of physics as unified by its core concepts, which grew from the same nineteenth-century sensibilities that favored classification schemes based on natural phenomena, the political view of unity allowed physicists a great deal of latitude to define both the outer boundaries of their subject and its internal structure. The institutional possibility of a field as large and unorthodox as solid state physics required some physicists to start behaving as though physics really was just what physicists do. Solid state physics, as the first field organized on such a basis, was a classification unlike any other before it. Its success, in the long run, would legitimize classifying physics on the basis of transient professional needs. The unusually broad character of solid state physics was evident as early as the January 1945 symposium where the proposal for a division (or a committee) was first submitted to communal scrutiny. The slate was strong with theoretically sophisticated talks. Gregory H. Wannier of the University of Iowa outlined new applications of statistical methods to cooperative phenom-

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ena.54 Van Vleck gave a review of theoretical approaches to ferromagnetism, beginning with phenomenological treatments of the early twentieth century and continuing through descriptions of competing quantum mechanical approaches. These approaches were based on exchange interactions, which, although part of the standard discourse among quantum theorists since the late 1920s, were still sufficiently obscure within the general American physics community that Van Vleck needed to caution his audience that “[exchange] forces cannot be described in simple intuitive language.”55 The symposium also demonstrated a commitment to the applications of solid state physics, and included contributions from Richard M. Bozorth and Howell J. Williams of Bell Labs, who described their work as “understanding of the behavior of magnetic materials in apparatus developed as a part of the war effort.”56 Watertown Arsenal’s Clarence Zener framed his treatment of the fracture stress of steel using unabashedly applied rhetoric, beginning by noting that the “sinews of warfare, namely guns, projectiles, and armor, are made of steel,”57 and Otto Breck of the Shell Development Company argued that the increasing importance of catalytic processes in chemical technology merited further attention to the topic from physicists.58 The broad cross section of work on display was representative of the similarly broad range of approaches and questions the DSSP ultimately unified. Van Vleck’s concern with how the exchange interaction might provide a more robust causal account of ferromagnetism had little to do conceptually with Zener’s interest in the phenomenology of steel. The fact that they both addressed some property of solid matter was a superficial commonality at best. Van Vleck’s discussion of ferromagnetism outlined how the ascent of quantum mechanics permitted a new causal understanding of the phenomenon. Such a presentation assumed his idea of the natural ordering of physics: the investigation of general laws allowed application to, and explication of, specific systems. Van Vleck, representing cutting edge theoretical work, was welcomed into the solid state union, where he found himself among the likes of Zener and Breck, with their overtly applied thrust, and Percy Bridgman, who, under the auspices of solid state, continued his long-standing research program on the physics of materials under high pressures, which aimed at qualitative description of the bulk properties of materials and avoided delving into quantitative generalization.59 Grouping these disparate enterprises within the same province of physics guaranteed that the new field would not respect existing, conceptually defined barriers between basic and applied physics. Solid state defined borders

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around a new area of physics based on convenience. The solid state was an expedient category because it was broad enough to encompass such a wide range of topics. Its breadth assured that it would not discriminate against industrial or applied physicists, who could often not state their focus area narrowly, allowing the DSSP to span academic and industrial territories that were otherwise isolated from each other. The strong applied component and expansive scope of solid state physics that came with its institutionalized form are further evident in its pedagogy. The first textbook to describe physical approaches to solid matter comprehensively, Frederick Seitz’s Modern Theory of Solids, appeared in 1940. It focused on the transition from classical to quantum approaches, with particular emphasis on the approximation methods that made regular crystalline solids susceptible to quantum mechanical description.60 Charles Kittel’s Introduction to Solid State Physics became the standard text after its second edition in 1955.61 The second edition expanded the textbook by about two hundred pages over the original 1953 printing. Much of the additional material dealt with practicalities that would be relevant to engineers and industrial physicists. Compared with Seitz’s formalism-heavy style, Kittel’s approach to theory was straightforward, in most cases relegating full quantum mechanical treatments to the appendixes. Kittel’s textbook also dedicated more space to applications, addressing in detail, for example, the properties of alloys and the behavior of transistors, illustrating concepts with descriptions of experimental techniques and appeals to easily observable laboratory phenomena. Having become the standard text, Introduction to Solid State Physics represented a field with a strong applied inflection. As John J. Hopfield remarked in his recollections of his training in solid state at Cornell in the 1950s: “The weakness of the book was that it left you (as a theorist) with no idea of where to start to develop a deeper understanding of any of the topics covered.”62 It was the textbook Mildred Dresselhaus adopted when hired to teach a theory of solids course at MIT that would be more accessible to engineers than the highly abstract style that dominated John Slater’s physics department. Her theory of solids course addressed the shortcomings Hopfield identified by supplementing Kittel’s book with 302 pages of handwritten, photocopied notes providing a methodical presentation of crystal structure and lattice dynamics leading into a detailed presentation of the electronic states of solids, which the course dwelled on because “for most of the practical applications of solids to our technological development, it is probably the electronic properties that are of the greatest interest.”63

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Seitz and Kittel wrote for different audiences. Seitz assumed a stronger background of his readers, targeting graduate students and practicing physicists. Kittel’s text was designed to be accessible to undergraduates. The differences nonetheless ran deeper. By the 1950s, solid state had not only been established as a much broader enterprise than Seitz’s treatment would suggest, but its first major coup, in the form of the transistor invented at Bell Laboratories, had come from industrial quarters.64 To be marketable in the 1950s, a text on solid state physics had to take into account the range of the field’s applications, not just its conceptual structure, and remain accessible to chemists and engineers. As Kittel noted in his preface: “Solid state physics is a very wide field.”65 Discontent with the name “solid state physics,” which persisted long after the name was validated by the APS and emblazoned on textbook covers, was a symptom of a deeper dissatisfaction with a category possessed of little inherent cohesion. The field nevertheless managed to hang together, if loosely, on the strength of common professional objectives. The political unity manifested by the formation of a solid state community in the United States differed in three substantial ways from conventional conceptual unity. First, it was institutionally imposed. Solid state physics could be said to be unified because it was guaranteed cohesion through institutional representation. Because solid state was so diverse, it required an organizational infrastructure if its various sectors were to avoid being annexed by other areas of physics, other sciences, or branches of engineering. As MIT electrical engineer Arthur von Hippel observed in 1942: “The fence between the two fields [physics and electrical engineering] is falling into disrepair. The electrical engineer has to learn and to apply atomic physics in order to understand and improve his new tools, and the physicist is beginning to talk about ‘high Q’s’ and ‘characteristic impedances’—and seems to like it.”66 The physicists who could speak the language of electrical engineering—or mechanical engineering, chemistry, or metallurgy—tended to be those who would be classified as solid state physicists. The weak conceptual boundaries that kept these fields apart meant that, if physicists interested in certain types of solid state problems were to be kept within physics, they would need institutional support and encouragement. Second, solid state was a malleable union. Its form was not supposed to be objectively fixed by any facts about the physical world. Such flexibility carried strategic potential. It allowed solid state physics to define itself in such a way that it might grow, adapt, and compete for funding and prestige. It could change its scope without endangering its standing. A solid state physicist

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could explore a new area of industrial interest, for instance, without transgressing the topical boundary of the field. Such flexibility proved critical as industry became a more prominent element of American physics in the post– Second World War era. Third, political unification allowed solid state to embrace the applied consequences of scientific research. Conceptual unity assumed that engineering applications of scientific knowledge lay permanently outside any unified field of physics. Solid state took a more flexible approach. By so actively seeking to provide applied and industrial physicists representation, it linked the traditional basic research arm of the physics community with a growing industrial sector in which technological needs demanded to be filled more forcefully than explanatory lacunae. These differences ensured that solid state remained a viable subfield, but also branded it an outsider. The field’s path over the subsequent decades reflects both the flexibility it enjoyed and the difficulties it confronted as a result. The debate over unity was, at core, a debate over what shape physics would take in the postwar community. It played out as a turf war within the APS. The growing constituency of industrial and applied physicists was out of step with the society’s traditional focus on basic research. Industrial growth was outstripping academic growth, and a strong industrial presence in the APS threatened to alter the society’s character by suggesting a broadening of its mission into areas some thought should not qualify as physics. Applied physicists were no less emphatic about their identity, however, pointing to their training and to the centrality of physical principles to their work, denying that manipulating and applying these principles made them less worthy of inclusion in the field than those who set out to discover them. They promoted institutional mechanisms that would allow them to operate within the APS while still maintaining a measure of autonomy. Building on G. P. Harnwell’s big tent ideal, in which the term “physicist” would be generously bestowed, advocates for industrial and applied physicists sought to reform American physics by promoting a broad topical scope and erasing topical and institutional value distinctions among its membership. John Van Vleck championed the traditionalist point of view in response to this challenge, staunchly maintaining that researchers with strictly applied interests fell outside of the APS mission and that including them would dilute the atmosphere of free exchange that characterized prewar American physics. His idea of unity was a purely conceptual one: physics was unified by a set of first principles that constituted the targets of physical investigation. The

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search for and manipulation of those principles held physics together largely undifferentiated. Van Vleck correspondingly opposed attempts to build bridges over which researchers who were not interested in those questions might swarm. The DSSP, taking as its central mission the problem of bridging the gap between industry and academia, emerged amid the tension between these opposing views of physics. To a limited extent, it succeeded in reconciling them. Karl Darrow and the APS council perceived a danger in allowing industrial physicists to lose the ability to identify with the physics community, but also insisted that industrial physicists’ primary allegiance within the APS be to a topic area and not to industrial applications per se. Because solid state physics emerged within the Physical Society’s divisional structure, it could not be oriented overtly toward industrial interests and instead broadened its scope to the point where it served in a fashion similar to the big tent physics community Harnwell envisioned, but on a more limited scale. The grand compromise that resulted in the DSSP aimed to fulfill the APS mission, not by closing off the division to those doing applied work, as Van Vleck would have liked, but by bringing applied physicists into contact with their basic counterparts within the confines of the society. In order to make this compromise work, the DSSP sought political unity. So as to maintain a wide-ranging field, serving both academic and industrial physicists working on both basic and applied problems, the framers of American solid state physics distanced themselves from the ideal of conceptual unity that had characterized the mission of the prewar APS. Solid state physics, to the extent it was a distinct unit, was distinct not by virtue of a wellframed research program or a common experimental approach, but by virtue of a community consensus, imposed and maintained by institutional decree.

4 THE PUBLICATION PROBLEM

The Physical Review continues to grow and to have financial problems. We have heard statements to the effect that probably no single individual is interested in more than one-tenth of the contents of the Review. —ALAN T. WATERMAN, 1955

Solid state physics, newly demarcated, grew quickly under the charge of its nascent American Physical Society (APS) division. From the group of six and the small confederation of fifty-odd metals physicists who had guided its formation, the Division of Solid State Physics (DSSP) grew to almost five times that size by the time the membership was submitted to its first unofficial census in 1948.1 By 1961 the division enrolled around eight hundred physicists, who constituted approximately 5 percent of the American Physical Society’s total membership, at a time when few joined divisions.2 The division’s ability to swell its ranks marked its viability shortly after its formation, but membership was only one dimension of the division’s growth. It also developed an increasing measure of autonomy, raising questions about its relationship with the APS. And its members contributed to the flood of papers that strained the capacities of existing journals. These factors combined to force a reckoning in the 1950s about the mission of solid state physics. Did it aspire to maximize its collaborative potential with neighboring fields, or to prove that it belonged among the pantheon of pure physics? In 1950, APS secretary Karl Darrow, at the APS council’s behest, suggested to the chairmen of the three divisions then established that they consolidate their contributed papers and symposia at the March meeting of the Physical Society, a practice that went gradually into effect over the following

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few years.3 Van Vleck remained concerned for the unity of physics, pushing unsuccessfully for the March meeting to be discontinued and divisional meetings moved to June in order to stem the flow of professional congresses that he felt exacerbated topical, temporal, and geographical rifts. Although Van Vleck’s opinion carried considerable weight, he was unable to muster widespread support for his position; lacking a clear consensus, the council elected to leave matters as they stood.4 Divisional hegemony over the March meeting grew. By the beginning of the 1960s, the DSSP had undertaken so much upon its own authority that Frederick Seitz, who was then serving on the APS council, was moved to chastise Elias Burstein, secretary-treasurer of the DSSP: “[The] Division of Solid State Physics has been getting out of hand, and is using loopholes to take independent action that seem improper to me and probably will to the Committee.”5 Seitz was not alone in his assessment that the DSSP was overreaching. Karl Darrow submitted a letter to the APS council complaining, “The Division of Solid State Physics gives at times the impression of acting as though the March meeting were its own private affair to locate as it chooses.”6 The APS power structure mobilized to bring the obstreperous division to heel. The scrap developed because the DSSP had, without approval from the APS council, made arrangements for its membership to attend the 1961 March meeting in Monterey, California. After the council, ignorant of the DSSP’s plans, accepted an invitation from Buffalo, New York, they were forced to backpedal on promises made to Buffalo hotels and conference centers. Those charged with issuing the red-faced mea culpas were understandably miffed. Seitz warned Burstein that the practice of planning meetings, especially in conjunction with other societies, without the blessing of the APS would “cause endless confusion and undermine the prestige of the APS,” and continued: “Should there be a substantial feeling at present among a group of solid state workers that the APS is too confining, the group has the choice of starting its own organization outside the Society. It cannot, however, have complete autonomy and still enjoy the prestige and privileges of the APS.”7 Burstein had, in the past, expressed the view that it would be “more desirable for the Division to have an APS meeting to itself, except for occasional planned joint meetings with other Divisions of APS,” but showed no indication of wanting to split from the Physical Society entirely.8 The Monterey episode indicates two facets of solid state physics’ development through the 1950s. First, it was rapid and robust. The division’s

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expansion in size and influence allowed it to mediate interactions between solid state physicists and associated groups in the American Chemical Society and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics when a decade earlier it was scarcely more than a modestly conceived mechanism for arranging symposia within APS meetings. Second, however, it was somewhat out of step with the larger organization and sometimes chafed at the strictures of a centralized society. The tensions between the DSSP and the APS, which were sparked by the DSSP’s increasing autonomy, realized some of Van Vleck’s fears about Balkanization. Despite Seitz’s suggestion that the DSSP form a separate society if it could not operate within the confines of the APS, such a possibility does not appear to have received serious consideration. Nonetheless, the friction generated by the division’s independent functioning demonstrates the compartmentalizing influence divisions had over a subfield that was only loosely organized just ten years earlier. As solid state established itself within American science, these two facets predominated in determining its goals. Solid state was viable, but it was also perched precariously on the boundaries of the physics community. As Seitz’s emphasis on prestige indicates, the DSSP gained more from its association with the APS at this stage of its development than the society at large gained from the division’s activities, especially when those activities proceeded without the knowledge or approval of the council. As it managed its growth and negotiated its place within American physics, solid state physics honed its identity as a physical subspecialty and negotiated its place within the physics community. This chapter explores how growth, both within solid state physics and in the larger community, challenged the fledgling discipline, and demonstrates that the strategies the field’s early leaders adopted to meet those challenges cemented solid state within physics, while preserving the close connections with neighboring disciplines its early leaders had taken pains to cultivate. The most pressing way in which boundary concerns manifested themselves involved what became known among physicists as “the publication problem.” As the population of the American physics community in general —and the solid state community in particular—swelled, the established publication outlets strained under the pressure of increased submissions and ballooning publication costs. APS and American Institute of Physics (AIP) journals, the Physical Review especially, developed damaging publication delays, threatening priority in fast-moving fields and prompting physicists to clamor for a solution. These strains pressured the emerging discipline of

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solid state physics to reevaluate its identity by confronting anew the question of what audience it sought to reach. Some solid state physicists saw this as an opportunity to escape the confines of the Physical Review and build a closer association with chemical and metallurgical publications outlets. Others perceived the opportunity to start a new journal dedicated to solid state physics, asserting the field’s independence.9 Still others fought for a resolution within the established order, which would maintain solid state’s newly won place alongside the other subdisciplines of physics with which it had, until then, shared space in general physics journals, including the highly regarded Physical Review. The third option, which reaffirmed solid state’s identity as a field of physics, eventually carried the day, but not before a gut-check moment for the new field. Wrestling with questions about what solid state was positioned to accomplish, and with whom it should be communicating, helped to define a clearer sense of the field’s mission and overcome a portion of the anomie that characterized its early adolescence. By providing solid state with a clearer sense of place within the field of physics, the publication problem also fanned the first pangs of animosity between solid state and high energy physics, which would become a central theme of the subsequent decades. As the tectonics of the American physics community shifted in the postwar years, the resultant tremors spurred solid state physicists to take a clear stand on where their discipline would be situated and with whom it would cast its lot. That decision had long-ranging consequences for the terms on which solid state interacted with neighboring fields, both inside and outside physics. BACKGROUND TO THE PUBLICATION PROBLEM: THE JOURNAL EXPLOSION

When the Physical Review became a journal of international note under the editorship of John Torrence Tate in the 1930s, its publication rates shot up. It published 172 articles in 1925, the year before Tate took the helm. In 1931, it achieved a pre–Second World War peak of 380. New journals launched around this time siphoned away some articles from the Physical Review, tempering its growth, but for the rest of the decade its publication rate held steady at around 300–350 papers per year (see figure 1.1).10 The war precipitated a publication lull. The self-imposed embargo on publication of nuclear research, the diversion of physicists to the war effort, and the breakdown of international scientific communication conspired to decimate the journal’s output, which fell as low as 78 articles in 1945. But

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it rebounded with a vengeance, clearing its prewar high-water mark in 1948 and more than doubling it by 1953. In 1956, Physical Review published 1,212 articles, more than three times 1931’s volume, despite the fact that competing journals witnessed similar increases. The increase in publication reflected an increase in the number of physicists. The rate of PhD production, which had increased through the 1930s, only accelerated following the war. It also reflected an increase in the abundance of research funding. Not only were physicists more abundant, they were also flusher than they ever had been.11 The population of credentialed physicists was ballooning, and they had ready access to the resources required to translate their labors into papers. The Physical Review was unprepared for the deluge that the confluence of these factors caused. As the journal and the community it represented grew in size, both diversified in character, a change driven by the wave of specialization Van Vleck was doing his level best to stem. Specialization was accompanied by demographic shifts, which became an avid point of discussion in Physics Today, a monthly magazine founded in 1948. The magazine, conceived as a forum for articles of general interest from all branches of physics, was itself a response to a diversifying discipline. It had first been proposed at the National Research Council’s 1944 Conference of Physicists in Philadelphia, which had established the need for stronger communication mechanisms linking physicists and empowered the AIP to pursue it. Physics Today appeared, according to AIP director Henry Barton, as an “Institute journal suitable for circulation to all physicists . . . a readable report and discussion of what concerns physics and physicists—today.”12 Advocacy for the magazine through its early years centered on its capacity to address the challenge of a fragmenting community: “I am sure you are as keenly interested as the rest of us,” Gaylord P. Harnwell wrote to Frederick Seitz in 1950, “in making a go of Physics Today in order that the Institute may take on some unity and character through having a journal reaching all its members.”13 A general character was Physics Today’s most distinctive attribute. It presumed that some issues were of interest to all physicists, and provided a forum in which to discuss them. In a note opening the inaugural issue, editor David A. Katcher wrote, “As fields of research become more and more specialized, the knowledge shared by research workers in their technical journals is becoming a secret understood only within the specialized field,” and described the new journal as a prophylactic against insularity:

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Physics Today is for the physicist, to inform him in comfortable, everyday language, of what goes on and why and who goes where. But it is also for the chemist, the biologist, the engineer, to tell them of the science towards which they are driven by so many of their investigations; it is for the student, the teacher, the lawyer, the doctor, and all who are curious about physics; it is for administrative officials who deal with research; it is for editors and writers whose profession puts them midway between what is done and how it should be reported; it is for you, whatever reason brought you to this page.14

Katcher’s quixotic hopes for the magazine’s reach tells us more about the problems that precipitated its founding than its immediate impact. It was no longer possible, in the days of rapidly growing research output in more and more subspecialties, for a physicist to stay current on the whole range of issues that might hold potential interest. As solid state had shown the year before, the hoary fundamentalists of the old APS no longer had a monopoly on what could or could not be called physics. Keeping the chaotic range of new subfields in some kind of rational order required efforts to open common lines of communication. Physics Today responded to what Charles Weiner has called “the spirit of the forties.”15 Physicists, as they became ensconced in their specialties to a degree they had not been before, required an outlet that reaffirmed their shared identity and protected their mutual claim to postwar public approval. Physics Today debuted with a cover featuring J. Robert Oppenheimer’s iconic porkpie hat resting on the 184-inch cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (figure 4.1), affirming the status of nuclear physics as the cover story of the late 1940s. Nevertheless, early issues of Physics Today were scrupulously attentive to breadth. The abbreviated eight-issue run comprising the magazine’s first calendar year included features on cyclotrons, neutrinos, and liquid helium, but also explored connections between physics and cancer, electrical phenomena in the atmosphere, the origin of the earth, and oceanography.16 Promoting unity meant adopting a catholic editorial philosophy that welcomed perspectives from what previously would have been considered fringe provinces of physics. Physics Today actively courted any scientists, regardless of institutional affiliation or professional status, who self-identified as physicists or thought that physics research might be useful for their own work. The magazine’s second year brought indications that these efforts had

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Figure 4.1. Cover of the first issue of Physics Today. Reproduced from Physics Today 1, no. 1 (1948), with permission of the American Institute of Physics. Cover photo © University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

been successful at promoting outreach, if not at instilling unity. Physics Today would not become a mouthpiece for the emerging nuclear/particle physics constituency that was in the process of establishing itself as the standard bearer of American physics in the eyes of the public and federal funders. In the

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January 1949 issue, George Gamow published his philosophical suspicions that physics was converging on an ultimate set of theories and concepts. “If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants,” he speculated, “we will be able to say that physical science has reached an end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system.”17 Although Gamow took care to note that he was making no bold predictions, he did record his instinct that such a theory of the micro-scale was within grasp. Gamow’s suggestion that a self-consistent theory of elementary particles would render the rest of physics uninteresting provoked some indignant letters to the editor. Representative of these complaints, two long examples of which were accorded unprecedented column inches in the March issue, was Richard C. Raymond’s. The Pennsylvania State College (later University) thermodynamicist derided Gamow’s “unbridled speculation,” and took him to task for failing to appreciate the complexity of the physical world.18 By 1949, the editorial courting of diverse demographics was showing results, and a vocal portion of Physics Today’s readership found the grand speculations of nuclear and particle physicists outré.19 Nevertheless, contrary to the journal’s aims of unifying the community, some found its scrupulous attention to breadth alienating. George R. Harrison, then dean of the School of Science at MIT, cautioned Harnwell when the latter assumed control of an ad hoc committee to review the structure and effectiveness of Physics Today: “There is a species of nuclear physicist who has no use whatever for Physics Today, and who does not hesitate to make his views known. Listening to such people I would have thought that we should give up the Journal long since, but always when I have come to this conclusion I have found in other walks of life a set of opposite views to counterbalance them.”20 Along similar lines, Samuel Goudsmit, poised to take over the editorship of the Physical Review, commented in response to Harnwell’s invitation to serve on the magazine’s Governing Board: “It is obvious that Physics Today is meant for the broader group of non-academic colleagues with whom I have too little contact to know their needs,”21 and John Van Vleck replied that “some less pretentious publication, such as an appendix to the Physical Review, would be adequate for my own personal needs.”22 The unifying mission of Physics Today ran abruptly into the realities of

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its fragmentation. Those who perceived themselves as occupying the hard core of American physics, nuclear physicists in particular, had little use for a publication that was making active overtures to those engaged in far-ranging applications of physics. Much like solid state physics, Physics Today assumed the desirability of political unity and encountered pushback from the bloc of physicists who retained a firm commitment to conceptual unity. The magazine, despite being spurned by some, found an enthusiastic audience among a wide range of physicists. Given its commitment to breadth and efforts to instill unity, however haltingly, it is unsurprising that many early Physics Today articles confronted demographic issues. Not least among them was the question of industrial physics and its place. The second issue contained an apology for industrial research, which acknowledged that industry was pushing the boundaries of physics. “How can one measure the comfort of a floor?” asked Howard A. Robinson: “In years gone by this would not have been a proper question to ask a physicist, but in the past decade . . . physicists . . . have discovered, somewhat to their amazement, that these border-line problems in which an individual is part of the measuring system can sometimes be solved. Thus the broadening of physics to include physiological manifestations is now well established.”23 Robinson articulated the new orthodoxy among the industrial set that physics could no longer be contained within a traditional academic definition of pure science, or the newly popular category of basic research. Broadening into industrial areas was attributable in part to the legacy of war research. Even though APS membership was expanding at record rates during and after the war, PhD production had stalled. Vannevar Bush lamented in the very first issue of Physics Today that “we foolishly ceased to train [physicists] during the war.”24 The lack of traditionally trained PhD physicists created a problem for academic programs looking to expand their ranks or replace retiring faculty. Frederick Seitz, then at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, put the problem to William Shockley of Bell Labs early in 1945: Graduate education was stopped cold in the winter of 1940–41. Moreover, many of the men who would have entered graduate school then will probably never do so. If the present situation lasts another two years, there will be a missing generation covering a range between seven and ten years. In a recent survey the American Institute of Physics has decided that no less than 2000 Ph.D. physicists, who would have been created had the educational situation

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continued as of 1939, will never receive complete graduate training. These are just the men you would look forward to hiring. It seems to me there are three choices: (a) Hiring Ph.D.’s who will be thirty or over when they join your staff. (b) Hiring men who have not had formal graduate training but who have received an apprenticeship like at the Radiation Laboratory. (c) Waiting until a new group comes along in 1950 or later.25

Seitz was sour on each of these options. He harbored a prejudice that physicists over thirty had lost too many of their most creative years, regarded those without doctorates as risky investments, and dismissed the third option as “the worst of the three prospects.” He concluded pessimistically that “good physicists will be difficult to obtain in the immediate post-war period and that you will have to be willing to make some concessions.”26 The physics community’s growth, although robust, proceeded along nontraditional lines, challenged the prewar professional status quo, and upset long-standing training and hiring practices. Where academic institutions and quasi-academic research labs like Bell saw concessions, other areas of industry saw opportunity. A wide range of industrial interests proved more than willing to hire physicists who had cut their teeth on war work, however unorthodox their training. The Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab) at MIT and Harvard’s Radio Research Laboratory (RRL) had been particularly rigorous proving grounds for young solid state physicists who would otherwise have been occupied by their graduate education. An RRL administrative report boasted that “the requirements of RRL were far more stringent than those of even a peacetime industrial firm.”27 The success that both the MIT Rad Lab and the RRL enjoyed bringing new technologies into the field conditioned the expectations for lab-to-marketplace turnaround in postwar industry and exposed areas of research that were ripe for industrial exploitation.28 A survey conducted by the AIP in 1954 showed the proportion of physicists employed in industry gaining on the proportion employed in academia, with 42.0 percent still within the academy and 35.8 percent in industrial positions.29 Industries with direct interests in physical research, such as communications, atomic power, instrument and electrical component development, and aviation, employed the preponderance of industrial physicists; however, physicists also found homes in less obvious venues, like the textile,

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petroleum, plastics, and photography industries, which had previously been dominated by chemists. Not only had the size of the Physical Society and the publication load of the Physical Review ballooned by the mid-1950s, the physics community had assumed a distinctly different complexion. The growth of American physics, in population, publication volume, funding, and scope was unprecedented, to the point of creating cost, backlog, and relevance problems for its core publications. Furthermore, topical specialization and institutional reorientation within the community generated friction that threatened the discipline’s unity. When existing journals became saturated, facing the prospect of a growing backlog and damaging publication delays, these pressures prompted physicists to consider how a response to the publication problem might also be used to address the instability they saw in the professional sphere. The response from solid state physicists, discussed below, exposes some of the fault lines created by physics’ expansion into new professional and topical areas that could not be easily accommodated by traditional practices. BACKGROUND TO THE PUBLICATION PROBLEM: THE TRAJECTORY OF FREDERICK SEITZ

The task of mapping out possible responses to the publication problem was taken up by Frederick Seitz. A native San Franciscan, Seitz earned a physics and mathematics education at Stanford University, including a semester’s intermezzo at the California Institute of Technology, before relocating to Princeton for graduate school, where he joined in the first wave of Americans trained specifically in the physics of solids. Seitz would go on to become, through the central position he would occupy in the advisory apparatus of American science, a force shaping solid state’s institutional evolution. The intellectual oeuvre in which the mindset he brought to this position evolved is therefore worth exploring in some detail. While at Princeton, Seitz would form key professional connections and take on an intellectual approach that informed his later scientific work and institutional maneuvering. He encountered both Roman Smoluchowski, who visited Princeton in the mid-1930s before emigrating from Poland in 1939, and William Shockley, who was John Slater’s graduate student at MIT. Shockley was also a Californian and the two shared a cross-country road trip in Shockley’s DeSoto convertible to begin the 1932–33 academic year.30 Shockley, Seitz, and Smoluchowski would go on to form half of the group of

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six, which founded the American Physical Society’s Division of Solid State Physics, as discussed in chapter 2. Seitz’s training was just as important as the personal connections he made. Through the mid-1930s, three centers had emerged for aspiring physicists interested in solids. John Slater was lured from Harvard to MIT in 1930, where incoming president Karl T. Compton gave him free rein to expand the physics department in accordance with his vision. John Van Vleck, after stints at Minnesota and Wisconsin, returned to Harvard, where both he and Slater had earned their doctorates, in 1934.31 Finally, Eugene Wigner secured a permanent position at Princeton in 1938 in part at the urging of Van Vleck, but had, with the exception of a visiting stint at Wisconsin in 1937–38, held down one temporary appointment or another at Princeton since 1931.32 It was in this latter capacity that Wigner oversaw Seitz’s doctoral work, which Seitz later remembered as “one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.”33 Wigner, a Hungarian émigré, was an exception within this group. Slater and Van Vleck had both been trained at Harvard, learning their quantum mechanics from Edwin Kemble, who, in the 1920s, offered the first intensive training in quantum theory available in the United States. Their experience at the vanguard of quantum physics in the United States led Slater and Van Vleck to see themselves as carrying the torch for American physics.34 Van Vleck, in 1971, would bridle at an offhand suggestion that Slater was an heir to the British tradition. The Belgian physicist Léon Rosenfeld, in a historical overview of atomic theory, emphasized the formative nature of Slater’s postdoctoral visit to the Cavendish laboratory, referring to him as “a physicist educated in the British and American tradition.”35 Van Vleck sent Slater a copy of the article, along with an expressive note: “I am usually something of an Anglophile but the reference to your training . . . rather made my blood boil. I’ll grant you that Slater is an English name but what the author says makes about as much sense as it would be to say that I am Dutch-trained because my name is Van Vleck.”36 Slater was equally eager to distinguish American and European physical traditions, penning a Physics Today editorial in 1968 in which he attacked the conventional wisdom that American physics in the 1930s was dragged reluctantly into modernity by the influx of European émigrés.37 The hesitancy Van Vleck and Slater exhibited to sully their work with what they saw as baser pursuits can be better understood within the context of the pride they both took in representing American physics, and American

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theory in particular. Van Vleck’s resistance to divisions was one manifestation of this phenomenon. Wigner, in contrast, counted himself among “the Martians,” the group of Hungarian scientists that also included Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller, who were chased from Central Europe by Hitler’s rise.38 Wigner arrived in the United States with a background in chemical engineering, which he had studied at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, earning a doctorate in 1925. He recalled that his chemical education, which was more theory-oriented in Berlin than similar training in the United States would have been, “came in handy many times in my life in physics.”39 Indeed, Wigner’s career was characterized by remarkable topical breadth, which often involved flirtations with chemical phenomena. Moreover, Wigner came from a European tradition that was not shy when it came to talking about the reality of physical microstructures, even if only provisionally. He was immediately taken, for instance, with the discovery of the neutron, and wasted no time employing this new tool to better understand nuclear masses.40 Slater offers a compelling contrast on this score. He was famously embittered by his experience as a postdoc at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, snapping at Thomas Kuhn in an interview that he “never had any respect for those people [Bohr and Hendrik Kramers],” after his experience in Copenhagen. Although Slater later recanted, claiming that his differences with Bohr were scientific rather than personal, this unguarded remark indicates the lingering psychological influence Copenhagen had over Slater, negative though it might have been. While Slater was in Copenhagen, Bohr and Kramers seized on his idea that light–matter interactions could be described in terms of a suite of “virtual oscillators” that determined the probabilities of allowed quantum transitions as a way to escape the quantization of light that most others had accepted on the basis of Arthur Holly Compton’s explanation of his eponymous effect. The result was the short-lived Bohr–Kramers– Slater (BKS) theory, which denied light quanta at the expense of rejecting the strict conservation of energy, which it treated as a statistical phenomenon. By his own account, Slater felt as though he had been hijacked in service of an agenda that was not his own.41 He came back to the United States having been convinced that “Bohr was fundamentally of a mystical turn of mind and I’m fundamentally of a matter-of-fact turn of mind.”42 The commitment to a calculation-based style Slater brought to solid state can be traced in part to his experience abroad. He was repulsed by the

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speculative approach he saw in Bohr, having been convinced by the BKS experience that pursuing research on the basis of deeply held metaphysical prejudice was fruitless. Although Slater’s group at MIT, like Wigner’s at Princeton, bled over into chemistry, it did so for different reasons: Wigner was willing to employ approximation strategies gleaned from chemistry and maintained a chemist’s willingness to provisionally commit to expedient ontological assumptions. Slater, on the other hand, realized that there was little instrumental difference between cranking out wave functions for molecules and cranking out wave functions for solids. Slater’s approach to solid state and molecular theory, which, with the advent of electronic computers, would involve throwing more and more computing power at ab initio calculations, bore little resemblance to Wigner’s, which used the phenomenological features of solids, rather than quantum mechanical first principles, as a conceptual starting point. Wigner’s approach had a clear influence in the young Seitz, whose thesis, “On the Constitution of Metallic Sodium,” would remain his most influential intellectual contribution to physics. Published jointly with Wigner, it established what became known as the Wigner–Seitz method for describing the properties of metals. This approach negotiated between the two most prevalent alternatives at the time. The first, championed by Felix Bloch and Léon Brillouin among others, was the free electron model, which aimed to describe conduction and ignored chemical properties, which were the products of valence, by modeling the interactions between free conduction electrons and lattice vibrations in crystalline metals. The second, backed largely by Slater, aimed to describe a wider range of chemical and mechanical properties by calculating the influence of valence forces on metals.43 The former method offered a ready tool with which to confront electrical conduction, but the simplifications it introduced made it ill-suited for much else—for instance, it only worked for ideal metals—and led many physicists to view it as unsatisfactory as a result. On the other hand, Slater’s approach required laborious calculations, and, in an era before computing power made them tractable, could be faulted for being too cumbersome to be practically useful.44 Seitz and Wigner sought out a middle ground between these two methods. Wigner, drawing from his training as a chemical engineer, was sensitive to the notion that a theory of metals should describe more than electrical conduction. The two set out a method of approximation that struck a balance between solvability and verisimilitude, which would allow the free electron model to be applied to real, not just ideal metals. The use of creative approx-

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imation methods to simultaneously simplify calculations and capture structural features of complex systems would become a signature of solid state physicists’ approach.45 The influence of the 1933 paper in which Wigner and Seitz published their method, which rapidly led to extensions and applications by Slater, Van Vleck, Nevill Mott, and others, fueled Seitz’s early career. Through the remainder of the 1930s, he explored positions in both industry and academia, spending two years at the University of Rochester before finishing out the decade at General Electric. Moreover, the conceptual approach embodied in Seitz’s thesis was mirrored in his approach as an institution builder. Seitz repeatedly sought to combine the diverse approaches endemic to solid state into a cohesive whole. This often required sacrificing strict conceptual or methodological continuity while uniting diverse approaches under a single institutional banner. In 1940, Seitz released his textbook Modern Theory of Solids. It was the first comprehensive textbook devoted to the topic, and it would cement his influence over the field for decades. It reinforced the approach to solid state theory Seitz had acquired from Wigner, which emphasized creative approximation and attention to properties that were traditionally considered chemical alongside those more commonly found in physics training. Second, and perhaps more important, it marked the beginning of his gradual transition from practitioner to administrator. Through the 1940s and the early 1950s, until shortly after his arrival at the University of Illinois, Seitz remained an active research physicist. In the 1950s, he devoted increasing measures of his time to assorted advisory committees and governing boards, many of which would make crucial decisions about solid state and its direction. Modern Theory of Solids begins by striking the topically ecumenical note Seitz had inherited from Wigner. Seitz expressed his hope that the book would serve the needs of three types of reader: “First, of course, students of physics and chemistry who desire to learn some details of a particular branch of physics that has general use; second, experimental physicists and chemists, and engineers and metallurgists with mathematical leanings who are interested in keeping an eye on a field of physics that is of possible value to them; and third, theoretical physicists of various stages of development who are interested in the present status of that phase of solid bodies that deals with electronic structure.”46 This statement expresses an early vision for the permissive scope of what would become solid state physics: a field, firmly within physics, that was nonetheless broadly conversant with a variety of neighbor-

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ing disciplines. The influence of this vision is discernible in Seitz’s actions in the face of the institutional pressures that shook solid state in the 1950s. By the time the publication problem began to weigh on physicists’ minds, Seitz had become one of the most astute institutional animals in the solid state community. He developed a facility for navigating the labyrinth of advisory committees, society councils, and journal boards that gave him a low-angle view of the growing field. In 1949, Wheeler Loomis lured him to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, beginning a process that would produce one of the most influential centers of solid state physics in the country, second, perhaps, only to Bell Labs. From the center of the country, in an emerging center of solid state research, Seitz began to parlay his integration with disciplinary governance mechanisms into influence over the field’s direction. When physics journals began to stagger under pressures of growing backlogs, rising costs, and increasing specialization, he was therefore in a position to direct the response of solid state physicists. COPING WITH THE PUBLICATION PROBLEM

Signs of trouble with the Physical Review appeared in the late 1940s. Up until 1948, the journal turned a profit through subscription fees and page charges. At the January 1948 council meeting, however, the editor John Tate and society treasurer George Pegram made it clear that “the period in which the Physical Review returned a net profit to the Society from subscriptions of non-members has come to its end.” Failing to break even was not an immediate hardship, however, as long as other AIP journals were still profitable and the society enjoyed a “handsome surplus,” which would sustain its flagship publication for some time.47 The publication problem was on the radar, but would generate more heat than light through the next few years. Tate’s death in 1950 and the transfer of editorial operations to Brookhaven National Laboratory produced logistical issues aplenty to keep all concerned occupied as the journal grew thicker and slipped further into the red. By 1953, the financial situation had become pressing. Pegram’s report on the society’s financial situation warned that “the Society may have done a little better than ‘break even’ during 1952, even without taking into account the $20,000 donated by the National Science Foundation to assist in meeting the deficit of The Physical Review; and that he expects that in 1953 the margin of income over expenditures may attain $30,000.”48 By the mid-1950s, increasing publication costs and delays spurred action.

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Both the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics put institutional machinery into motion to address it. At the April 1955 APS council meeting, Samuel Goudsmit, Tate’s successor as the Physical Review’s managing editor, provided “a lengthy report on the situation ensuing from the interminable expansion of The Physical Review.” In accordance with the “ominous” financial prospects such expansion brought about, the council approved steep hikes in both page charges and subscription rates. A motion to split the journal, proposed to gauge opinion rather than to spur action, was defeated, and the council also ruled unfavorably on a proposal that the APS take over the Journal of Chemical Physics from the AIP. Nonetheless, the prospect of major restructuring loomed. Goudsmit recorded his strong feelings “that the American Institute of Physics should enlarge its journals.”49 The AIP had similar inclinations. Institute director Henry A. Barton commented in March of 1955: “Pressure for publication of research results in certain fields has again come to the point of severe strain,” and although he did not promote any specific solutions, he assured his readers that “the Institute stands ready to help study such problems and continually investigates proposed ways of reducing publishing costs.”50 Barton and the AIP Governing Board, at their March meeting, appointed a joint AIP-APS committee to generate recommendations for easing the publication burden. Demographic changes complicated the committee’s mission, particularly the increasing importance of industrial physics. Seitz made the observation, common by that point, that “industrial organizations which were uninterested in physicists prior to 1940 are now eagerly attempting to hire Ph.D.’s.”51 Solid state in particular thrived on the growth of physics in industry, and the separate interests and professional challenges that drove industrial physicists contributed to the professional instability solid state experienced amid the publication crunch. Alan T. Waterman, director of the National Science Foundation, singled out the Physical Review as one site where diversification within physics could be identified. Replying to Karl Darrow’s request for funds to support the AIP’s publication study, Waterman reported hearing “statements to the effect that probably no single individual is interested in more than one-tenth of the contents of the Review.” He further suggested that if this really was the case: “It may eventually be desirable or even necessary to restrict publication in the journals of wide circulation to papers of more general interest. Questions such as this could be studied objectively. Perhaps the recent vote with the Physical Society on the desirability of splitting the Review has already shed

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some light on the question.”52 The field of physics was becoming compartmentalized and the growth of topical enclaves put pressure on a journal structure that was conceived for a small community with few internal divisions. These considerations motivated the second circular letter—the first being “The Present War Is a Physicist’s War” distributed by the group of six—that would bear heavily on the fate of solid state physics. In March 1955, on behalf of the AIP-APS joint committee, Seitz circulated a questionnaire to selected solid state and chemical physicists asking if they would welcome an exodus of solid state publication from the Physical Review to the Journal of Chemical Physics (JCP), which the committee tentatively proposed renaming the Journal of Solid State and Chemical Physics.53 The JCP was published by the AIP, but, as the Division of Chemical Physics was being formed in 1949, a few members of the APS began advocating for the society to take it over.54 The idea had been bandied about for several years, but failed to produce any substantial changes. Having been a regular element of council meeting discussions, however, the notion of acquiring the JCP, not just for chemical physics, but for solid state as well, was a logical option to pursue. At the time, the authorship of the JCP was composed principally of chemists.55 The field known as chemical physics—as distinguished from physical chemistry—was conceived and operated as an interdisciplinary field, but it was populated predominantly by those trained in chemistry, even though they often published in physics journals, and the chemical physics graduate programs across the United States tended to be housed in chemistry departments.56 Colocating chemical and solid state physics publications in JCP would therefore necessitate a much closer relationship between the solid state and chemistry communities than the names alone would suggest. With that consideration in mind, Seitz advanced the suggestion cautiously: It is the writer’s opinion that this transformation would inevitably make the journal less valuable to the chemists who do not participate actively in the APS or AIP and hence would act to the disadvantage of this important segment of the scientific world. For this reason the change would probably not be justified unless a great majority of the solid state physicists would be willing to use the transformed journal as their principal outlet for publication, leaving the Physical Review in the main to the nuclear physicists and diverse minorities which would not feel at home in the revised journal.57

The enclosed survey asked those interested to indicate, (a) their field (solid state, chemical physics, or other), (b) whether they favored, did not favor, or

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were agnostic about the proposal, and (c) their willingness to publish in the revised journal. Responses were mixed, although tilted distinctly against the proposal.58 Harvard’s Harvey Brooks replied: “While I can see some virtue in a closer relation between Chemical Physics and Solid State Physics, shotgun marriages of this sort are usually not very successful,”59 and concluded that since the interests of solid state physics cleaved more closely to the topics covered by the Physical Review, a forced exodus in the direction of chemistry would be inadvisable. William Shockley, on the other hand, favored the proposal, commenting: “Solid state physics papers are now too diffuse a component of the Phys. Rev.”60 Voices favoring and opposing the proposal shared a concern for boundary issues, but differed on how to navigate them. George E. Pake, head of the physics department at Washington University in St. Louis, neglected to identify himself either as a solid state or as a chemical physicist. Instead he pointed to magnetic resonance as his primary research interest, suggesting that it bridged the divide. In favoring the proposal, Pake maintained that “structure of matter physics and chemical physics do not have a readily discerned boundary between them.”61 Walter Kohn, then of the Carnegie Institute, held the opposite view. In his eyes, “Solid state physics has closer ties to other branches of physics than to chemistry and would be damaged if these ties were weakened.”62 The difference between Pake’s view and Kohn’s fell along topical lines and their disagreement is emblematic of a clear split within the pool of reactions to the proposal Seitz was able to assemble. Pake, an experimentalist who helped develop early nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, saw applications of those techniques flow smoothly from solids to molecules, with little practical or conceptual difference. Nuclear magnetic resonance formed what Cyrus Mody calls an “instrumental community,” a community organized around specific instrumental practices and committed to their instrumental uses, wherever those uses led.63 Kohn, on the other hand, was a theorist who had made his career up to that point in semiconductor physics. His research wrestled with the foundational issues quantum mechanics faced when applied to complex systems, and he was therefore less inclined to think that he had much to gain from a closer association with chemistry.64 Similarly, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Hillard B. Huntington, a theorist focusing on metallic lattice structures and dynamics worried about too close an association with chemistry, responding: “I don’t believe that

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solid state physics and chemical physics will be compatible bedfellows in such a close union.”65 Conyers Herring, founder of Bell Laboratories’ theoretical physics division, was concerned that “this move would tend to widen the gulfs between solid state physics and fundamental physics, on the one hand, and chemistry, on the other.”66 Columbia’s Shirley L. Quimby supported the proposed merger. He articulated his instinct that those “engaged in experimental research . . . will favor the proposed journal and patronize it.”67 Several other self-identified chemical physicists also expressed a willingness to publish alongside solid state physicists, as long as the latter did not displace chemically oriented work. This wide range of responses reflects the parochial interests of the respondents. Spencer Weart has argued that the diverse conceptual scope of solid state physics made it susceptible to the formation of smaller internal social structures, each of which developed its own set of values and interests.68 Questions about how solid state, as a field, should govern its publication practices did not simply generate opposing camps, one in favor of a closer alliance with neighboring disciplines and one opposed. Rather, individual subgroups fell on one side or the other of this divide on the basis of highly local considerations. If a research program happened to enjoy a close and mutually constructive relationship with chemistry, then its members would be favorably disposed to publishing alongside chemists. Those representing other groups saw little to gain from such crossover and were bemused and alarmed at the suggestion that they should conceive of themselves as engaged in an interdisciplinary undertaking. The responses to Seitz’s circular expose some of the developments that, even into the mid-1950s when the field was well established, strained the stitching of a patchwork solid state community as research-based subgroups formed and developed clearer perspectives on their interests. The most vehement opposition to the proposal came from solid state theorists, especially those in the influential semiconductor group, who were busy adapting the methods of quantum mechanics to complex systems and saw little profit in distancing their work from the core publication outlet of the physics community. The case in favor of the proposal was carried mostly by those experimentalists who identified relevance for their work to both chemical and solid state problems. Chemists and chemical physicists also lent their support, both because of the experimental connections and because techniques developed in the context of solid state theory were relevant for theoretical chemistry.69 The breadth of the solid state enterprise meant that the connections researchers

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drew to related fields depended strongly on the type of work in which they were engaged. The theory/experiment division is one dimension of this effect, but topical focus was also a factor. Views about how to structure solid state publications therefore reflected convictions about how the discipline should be organized. This pattern of responses raises the question of why the committee produced a proposal that was so evidently out of step with the desires of those who self-identified as solid state physicists and felt strongly enough to respond to the survey. Why did the committee, after reviewing the facts on the ground, craft a proposal that was so widely panned? The answer can be found by examining the emergence of one consolidated bloc within solid state that was vocal, but not necessarily representative of the whole. As indicated above, physicists as a whole, and solid state researchers in particular, were increasingly topically diverse and industrial. Solid state physicists in industry were collaborating regularly with chemists and engineers. At the same time, however, several cohesive research programs were developing within a field that had hitherto been without a clear center. The proposal that solid state form an alliance with chemistry touched a nerve with members of these groups. Those interested in the electrical and magnetic properties of matter showed particular resistance. Notably, this was the same area where John Van Vleck had made his most important contributions. It had also produced some of the most technologically relevant discoveries, such as the transistor. As the area that had the most quickly and successfully adopted quantum methods, it was also the area whose practitioners were best able to claim that they occupied intellectual frontiers of physics. This group, as a result, was positioned to exert considerable influence on the professionalization process. Its representatives, like Kohn, were more inclined to see solid state as a traditional physical subfield than as an interdisciplinary synthesis and therefore opposed too close a marriage between solid state and chemistry, metallurgy, or engineering. A decision about how, if at all, to restructure the publishing patterns of solid state physicists would therefore be a test of their status and influence over the direction of the field. Just as Seitz was getting a sense of how the journal infrastructure in the United States would shape the future of solid state physics, he was blindsided by Harvey Brooks, the Harvard physicist and student of John Van Vleck who had earlier expressed skepticism about the wisdom of a closer alliance between solid state and chemistry. Seitz and the AIP had been deliberately testing the waters before acting on the publication problem, and so were taken

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aback upon learning that Brooks had, without consulting the movers and shakers at the AIP or the APS, cofounded the International Journal of the Physics and Chemistry of Solids in partnership with Pergamon Press. As the title indicated, this new journal was an international effort, publishing articles in Russian, French, German, or English, and seeking to meet the perceived need within the global community “to encourage greater interchange between physicists and chemists interested in solids.”70 The foreword to the first issue, published in September 1956, began: “The emergence of solidstate physics as a recognized specialty of physics has taken place over a period of many years. A more recent development, stimulated partly by the growth of industrial interest in the field, has been the growing realization of the common interests of physicists and chemists in the problems of solids.”71 The journal met a clear demand within the solid state community. But that community was already highly heterogeneous, and it was not yet clear to its leaders that this particular constituency should govern the direction of publication within the field. The journal’s sudden appearance therefore preempted the AIP’s efforts to manage the publication problem domestically. Seitz, while the survey of the community was in progress, had initiated discussions with the Academic Press about the possibility of founding a new journal, with an audience to be determined by whatever needs the AIP-APS committee identified, the scope of which would be tuned so as to siphon an appropriate publication load from the Physical Review. Brooks, by acting outside of the powerful institutional mechanisms the AIP and APS were erecting, limited their ability to scale their response to the publication problem by selecting a considered topic and volume for the new journal. Brooks lent support to an interdisciplinary journal and had thereby decided to favor a closer association with both industry and chemistry, just as Seitz was getting a sense that this was precisely what the most vocal constituency within solid state did not want. Brooks was cowed when he learned that he had upset the AIP apple cart. He avoided extending the issue even so far as his secretary, and self-typed a long, effusively apologetic letter to Seitz describing how he had succumbed to a hard sell from General Electric’s J. Herbert Hollomon and Kevin Maxwell, the director of Pergamon Press’s international division. “As I think back over the history of this matter,” Brooks wrote, “I realized that my behavior has been somewhat inexplicable and not to my credit, and indeed in retrospect I feel quite unhappy about my actions.” He further expressed concern “with the fact that in this matter I have behaved with a degree of irresponsibility

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which is a matter of great regret to me, and I feel that I have not dealt fairly or honestly with you either in your capacity as chairman of the institute, or as representing Academic Press, or as a friend.” Nonetheless, Brooks maintained: “The job itself [as editor of the new journal] is a worth while one in my opinion, and I do not mean to imply by my present regrets that I have any hesitation in being associated with it other than the question of whether I can do a good job.”72 Seitz replied pointedly to Brooks’s contrite missive, outlining how the appearance of the new international publication outlet disrupted the AIP’s ability to mount a measured response to distinctly national challenges: “Until the character of the new journal is clearly established, it will have the effect of pre-empting the position for any other journal that might be contemplated. About half the interest of any new journal would be in the field yours will cover. Another individual might hesitate to accept the editorship at this time. I find it very hard to decide whether this is good or bad for American physics as a whole.”73 Brooks unwittingly trammeled Seitz’s best-laid plans, but his journal was an honest response to widespread demand. Its impact was not to prevent the AIP from responding to the publication problem, but to render a summary decision on how the problem would be addressed. It was a response, although perhaps not the precise response that would have emerged from a more deliberative process. For better or worse, the AIP and the APS could now focus their respective responses to the publication problem more narrowly. The new international journal would not bear enough of the national publication output to adequately address the glut, which consumed the APS in the mid-1950s to the extent that committees on its various aspects proliferated. These included, as of 1956, the “Standing Committee to consider such publication-problems as Managing Editor does not accept as lyin[g] in his province,” the “Committee to consider a proposal of National Science Foundation regarding publications in physics,” and “Committee to study all aspects of the problem of publications of American physics.” By 1957, the former two had, in the fanciful phrasing of Karl Darrow, reached “what some nineteenth-century statesman called a condition of innocuous desuetude.”74 Three factors led to reduced urgency of the publication problem. The emergence of new outlets—Brooks’s journal, along with a smattering of other privately funded physics journals— was one. Second, as increases in page charges and subscription fees kicked in and officials cracked down on loopholes—such as librarians joining the APS to get its journals at member rates rather than library rates—publication

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operations inched back toward solvency. Finally, the Physical Review gained a pressure valve in the form of Physical Review Letters, which launched in the middle of 1958 with funding from the National Science Foundation. The fast-publishing journal for short pieces, previously accommodated as letters to the editor in the Physical Review, satisfied the demand for a quick-toprint outlet that could protect priority claims for important new research and relieved the Physical Review of a substantial volume of contributions. In part due to the relief Physical Review Letters provided, the Physical Review had nearly cleared out its backlog by 1960. A relieved Samuel Goudsmit reported to the January council meeting that his long-suffering journal was “well on the way to catching up.”75 The shortening of the Physical Review’s turnaround time took considerable oomph out of the pressures favoring a topical realignment of the society’s publication structure. For the time being, all topics of physics would remain aligned with the field’s flagship journal. The upshot was that, despite a great deal of hand-wringing and the existence of several seemingly viable plans that would have given solid state physicists new publication homes, the bulk of the American solid state community continued publishing in the core journals. A combination of small, specialist journals springing up on their own initiative, a return to solvency for the Physical Review, and strong opposition from a small but vocal bloc of solid state physicists ensured that solid state would remain firmly established as a subfield of physics and avoid any organizational commitment to the relationships it often built informally with related fields. COMMITTING TO PHYSICS

The challenges of a crowded publication landscape did not evaporate once solid state’s helmsmen resolved to steer safely inside the boundaries of the physics community, but the disciplinary identity crisis did subside, for a time. Solid state would effectively get a dedicated journal in 1970, when the Physical Review split into four separate sections, with Physical Review B dedicated to solid state.76 By that time, solid state’s position within physics was more stable than it had been in the mid-1950s and the subdivision of the journal, which had become a simple necessity based on the volume of articles Physical Review was publishing, did not raise questions about the field’s elemental identity. Solid state physics in the 1950s was analogous to a disorganized system beginning to self-organize. The ecumenical spirit with which it was founded in the 1940s left it unusually susceptible to the formation of interest groups,

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particularly those that naturally grew around research programs, and which shared few strong intellectual connections with other such groups that also formed under the auspices of solid state. These interest groups developed differing visions for the future of the field. As new professional challenges emerged during the 1950s, these groups were given the opportunity to nudge solid state physics in a direction that better suited their goals. The objection of one of these groups to a closer association with chemistry contributed to solid state’s avoiding steps that would have nudged its publishing operations away from the rest of physics. It helped that the group was well organized—more so than the field as a whole—and vocal. Their success was due in part to the structure of the solid state community. The lack of a commonly shared conceptual program meant that solid state was grouping into smaller, weakly interacting communities built around specific research programs. The thrust of the whole solid state confederation could be shifted substantially if only one of these groups, or a small subset of them, chose to speak up. In this case, the cadre of solid state physicists who had built a cooperative network centered on the electromagnetic properties of solids mustered an emphatic response to an active question of disciplinary policy. Even though this group did not necessarily represent solid state physicists as a whole, they made enough of an impression on those responsible for making the decisions that they were able to guide the field in the direction that best suited their own interests. Their cause was aided by the timely appearance of several small journals that relieved some of the pressure on APS and AIP publishing operations and reduced the impetus for sweeping changes in publishing patterns. Two factors are particularly notable about this episode. The first is that it resulted from a delicate series of contingencies. Seitz and his publications committee were in a position to exercise considerable sway over how community dynamics within solid state evolved. Their research indicated a field that, by and large, would welcome official recognition of the close association between solid state physics and chemistry that they saw on the ground, particularly in industrial laboratories. After Harvey Brooks unwittingly threw a wrench in the works, their power was curtailed substantially. A vocal minority favoring inaction thereby gained additional weight. The second is the particular character of that vocal minority. The cohesive group of researchers—and theorists in particular—emerging around studies of the electromagnetic properties of solids began to resemble a traditional subfield on a small scale much more than solid state itself did, even

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at low resolution. This group was committed to maintaining their enterprise as a part of physics and resisted any efforts that would introduce ambiguity about where solid state stood. This group was, in fact, the nucleus of what would become “condensed matter physics,” the establishment of which is explored in chapter 8. They were wary of the conventional basis on which solid state was founded and saw the fractiousness that resulted as an obstacle in their quest to garner wider recognition for their intellectual contributions to physics. In this sense, solid state physicists’ response to the publication problem proved to be both edifying and destabilizing. On the one hand, it resolved some lingering ambiguity about the boundaries of the terrain on which solid state would pitch its oversized tent. On the other, it set the stage for a challenge to solid state’s conventional definition. By exerting their influence to keep solid state within the established physics journals, the ascendant bloc of condensed matter theorists established the groundwork for reorganizing their activities around a well-defined family of conceptual approaches. The publication problem, although it might have been a relatively minor challenge when seen in the larger context of American physics in the 1950s, was a prelude to future and more complete reorganizations of the research traditions that made up solid state physics.

5 BIG SOLID STATE PHYSICS AT THE NATIONAL MAGNET LABORATORY

It is preposterous . . . that the country’s only national facility for high magnetic field research is hamstrung while millions are being spent on redundant facilities in other scientific disciplines. —BENJAMIN LAX, 1967

The National Magnet Laboratory (NML), established in 1960, was solid state’s answer to the large-scale particle accelerators that became the definitive research instruments of high energy physics. The NML, designed to produce very high magnetic field strengths in order to study the magnetic properties of matter, was the brainchild of Francis Bitter. A background in both metallurgy and the quantum theory of magnetism predisposed Bitter to a vision of solid state physics as a field dedicated to the search for fundamental knowledge. That vision would guide NML, even after Bitter’s poor health prevented him from directing the facility he had designed, but the lab would also face considerable pressure, both from within and without, to make its programming more directly answerable to short-term technical needs. The NML was born into the era of big physics. Following the Second World War, physicists from the whole sweep of subject specialties and institutional settings had acclimated to lavish government spending. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which dispensed its first grants in 1950, represented a stable commitment to federal support for research. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ensured a ready source of support for nuclear physics. And military organizations like the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Office of Naval Research had overflowing coffers, a vague but powerful conviction in the merits of opening them to scientific research, and few

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guidelines for how they were permitted to dispense funding. The unprecedented munificence of these organizations permitted scientists to imagine research on a new scale, and to regard it as normal. The NML was the first large facility to support a significant focus on solid state research, but others followed. Later in the 1960s, the AEC founded nuclear reactor facilities at the National Laboratories optimized to produce high neutron flux. The High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which, like the NML, were multiuser facilities, supported neutron diffraction research that became critical for the study of materials.1 Brookhaven undertook the National Synchrotron Light Source in the 1970s, which took what had previously been a nuisance for high-energy accelerator designers, synchrotron radiation, and harnessed it to enable precise X-ray and ultraviolet scattering experiments in a wide variety of fields, but particularly in the study of materials.2 The NML anticipated the style of big science conducted in both high-flux research reactors and synchrotron sources, which emphasized service to outside users and the flexibility to adapt to the needs of various research programs, making it an early example of trends culminating in what Robert P. Crease and Catherine Westfall call the “new big science” of the late twentieth century.3 But unlike high-flux reactors or synchrotron sources, which were quickly forced to compete with similar facilities for users, the NML remained unique for some time as a large facility dedicated to high magnetic fields. Magnetism was among the largest interest groups within solid state physics, and it interacted robustly with neighboring fields. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers organized a series of well-attended conferences on magnetism and magnetic materials, beginning in 1955, which the American Physical Society (APS) cosponsored and which many solid state physicists attended.4 The momentum behind magnetism research ensured robust demand for the NML’s services and, in the eyes of its administrators, set it apart from the particle accelerators that were proliferating around the same time. Aside from its place in the well-known story of Cold War big science, the NML also features in the related, but less well understood story of how tightening science budgets reshaped the research landscape in the 1960s.5 A focus on federal spending for social programs as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation, the war in Vietnam, and the growth of a more intricate bureaucracy within the funding organizations conspired to make funding scarcer and to require greater accountability from grant recipients.

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Many facilities and research programs that had grown optimistically on the nourishment of relatively unfettered government support had to adapt, quite abruptly, to leaner times. Federal belt-tightening affected some areas of physics more than others. Particle physics saw this in the 1960s with the ribbon cutting for the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which would remain the world’s most powerful accelerator until 1968. By then, high energy physics facilities had become important for sustaining the country’s international scientific prestige. The future of high energy physics was assured by the unflinching commitment of the AEC, along with supplementary support from NASA, the DOD, and the NSF, and it emerged from the decade with congressional commitment to fund the National Accelerator Laboratory (NAL), which would become better known as Fermilab.6 Relying to a greater extent on discretionary funding from the DOD, solid state physics faced steeper cuts. Solid state physicists found it particularly difficult to find support for exploratory or theoretical research, and at a time when many in the field saw that work as critical for maintaining their intellectual standing with respect to other subfields of physics. Examining how a large facility dedicated principally to solid state research responded to these pressures permits a comparison between solid state–style big physics, and big physics as seen through particle accelerators. Both proceeded from the conviction that the new fundamental knowledge about the physical world made possible by quantum mechanics could be accessed by the large machines made possible by expanded federal funding. Francis Bitter, along with Benjamin Lax, the NML’s first director, understood the facility as the solid state analogue of the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and similar high-energy facilities, and in some respects it was similar. It was driven by the ethos of research at the extremes—the extremes of higher energy particles in one case, and higher intensity magnetic fields in the others. Both types of facility ostensibly existed to satisfy our elementary curiosity about the physical world. But internal tensions over the NML’s mission indicate that the pull of applications was never far from solid state work, and that its researchers and administrators were called to balance those missions in ways high energy facilities were not. The financial struggles of the mid- to late 1960s are particularly revealing of how big solid state physics differed from big particle physics, and of how the pure science ideal, which lived on despite the challenges

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to its dominance in the 1940s and 1950s, had to be hybridized with applied relevance in the context of solid state research. FRANCIS BITTER AND A VISION FOR PHYSICAL METALLURGY

In 1939, Francis Bitter was a young associate professor in MIT’s Department of Mining and Metallurgy. His background, though, was characteristic of an American physicist of this era—unlike many of his departmental colleagues with backgrounds in engineering or chemistry. His commitment to physics was secured by a predoctoral stint in Berlin in the eventful years of 1925 and 1926. Bitter recalled hearing Max Planck speak on thermodynamics, attending the colloquium at which Erwin Schrödinger introduced wave mechanics, and teaching himself electricity and magnetism from Max Abraham’s textbook, The Classical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism.7 Bitter earned his PhD in physics from Columbia University in 1928. Between leaving Columbia and joining MIT, he spent time at assorted and auspicious institutions. He conducted postdoctoral research with Robert Millikan at Caltech, worked as a research physicist for Westinghouse, and visited the Cavendish Laboratory on a Guggenheim Fellowship. During these appointments, his interests evolved from his thesis work on the magnetic susceptibilities of gases to the nature of ferromagnetism.8 Arriving at MIT fresh off his Guggenheim, Bitter was enthusiastic, and his outlook on metallurgy bullish. He articulated a vision for metallurgy in an unpublished document entitled “Abstract of the Present State and Possible Developments in Physical Metallurgy.” The document articulated his hopes that metallurgy could transcend its historical focus on classifying the specific properties of metals and alloys and seek fundamental contributions. The vision articulated in his “Abstract” would also shape his subsequent efforts to craft the National Magnet Laboratory’s mission. Bitter described his strategy for molding metallurgy into fundamental science as follows: During my brief association with the subject of metallurgy I have obtained the impression that in this field more than any I have come into contact with, there is now an opportunity for rapid and fundamental development through an application of the concepts and techniques of physics and chemistry. The achievement of such progress must come as a result of the cooperative effort of a group of men whose chief interest it is to discover and classify the properties of metals and alloys in all their generality with the aim of formulating physical

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laws, rather than to follow the behavior of certain special alloy systems in detail with the aim of developing and understanding commercial processes.

Bitter distinguished between the engineering and the scientific components of metallurgical research and found that through insufficient development of the latter, the former lacked “proper help and stimulation of a fundamental nature.”9 He described how metallurgy might position itself to make what he deemed fundamental contributions, which involved building a robust conceptual foundation rooted in physics and chemistry, plus a strategy for collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to borrow techniques and insights from fields with established fundamental research programs. This grand vision for metallurgy might just as well have been a roadmap for the as-yetunnamed solid state physics. It called for understanding general features of metals through theoretical physics, a focus on mechanical properties, research on crystal structure, and increased understanding of phase transitions, all of which would fall under the auspices of solid state once the field cohered after the Second World War. Bitter’s understanding of fundamentality was an inclusive one. Physics had it, chemistry had it, and metallurgy could attain it by adopting the nobler habits of these disciplines. Bitter’s optimism for the future of metallurgy required a two-stage process of fostering basic insights and then building a close relationship with, while still maintaining a separation from, practical applications. “The physicist develops the fundamental laws which the engineer applies. In chemistry we have a similar situation,” he wrote, before presenting his rhetorical call to arms, asking: “Who, in metallurgy, is doing a similar job?”10 Bitter emphasized that constructive dialogue between abstract science and its applications could generate advances in both, and that establishing regular discourse between them was necessary to make the field of metallurgy a fundamental science. Bitter’s disquisition on metallurgy outlined two dimensions of fundamental research. The first was the formulation of general principles; the second, a practical consideration, was usefulness in a wide variety of new research. The main flaw Bitter perceived in contemporary metallurgical work was insufficient emphasis on codifying regularities in the behavior of metals. The field lacked the generalizing input of theory. The hallmarks of fundamental disciplines, Bitter maintained, were theoretical principles that applied—and that actually were applied—beyond narrowly defined systems. A science concerned with the properties of metals and alloys, therefore, could become fun-

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damental by crafting a theoretical scheme useful for describing the properties of metals and alloys as a class of materials. Organizing existing knowledge into a generalized scheme, though, was not the ultimate goal of fundamental research; fundamental science also had to prove useful in areas where knowledge was less sure-footed. Bitter emphasized fecundity as a marker of fundamentality. This term implies the actual, not just the potential, generation of intellectual progeny: the general principles that satisfy Bitter’s first criterion can be deemed fundamental once they prove their worth in a realm for which they were not specifically designed. From this perspective, achieving fundamentality demands more than modeling research on disciplines that already exhibit it; it requires building the personal and institutional relationships through which research efforts can exercise influence. Science becomes fundamental, in this sense, when those relationships have provoked new research and served as a foundation for new conclusions. Bitter perceived this quality in physics and chemistry. Both sciences aimed to formulate general principles, but, more important, rich interactions between inquiry and applications drove progress in these sciences and made them broadly applicable to fields like metallurgy and engineering. For Bitter, the problem was not just that metallurgists wanted for a robust theory of metals; they were not even in dialogue with people who were working to develop one. In the absence of such an interaction, Bitter thought, metallurgy would be limited to cataloguing and quantifying the properties of a growing alloy zoo. This type of research, because it did not pursue general laws or ask novel questions, could never be fundamental. His remedy was to encourage metallurgists to overcome the insularity of their field and collaborate with physicists and chemists to build the bridges that would foster new thinking. Bitter’s recommendations called for MIT metallurgists to change the way they organized their department and fit within institute infrastructure, suggesting, for example, that “one or two physicists in the metallurgy department . . . carry out their work in close contact with the rest of the staff,” and promoting “closer contact with [John C.] Slater’s work in Physics and with the work of [Charles W.] MacGregor in Mechanical Engineering.”11 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL MAGNET LABORATORY

Bitter’s view of fundamental knowledge was pivotal to the founding and growth of the National Magnet Laboratory two decades later. Bitter coordinated planning for the NML, which opened in 1960. Its early history reflects

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Francis Bitter’s 1939 vision. The proposal that convinced the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to fund the lab framed its mission compatibly with Bitter’s notion of fundamentality, its goal being “to make continuous fields up to 250,000 gauss available for fundamental research in solid state and low temperature physics and related fields, and to serve as a center for advancing the art of field generation.”12 Bitter had transferred to the physics department in 1945 and he built the NML with solid state physics, rather than metallurgy, in mind.13 The NML would support foundational research in order to enrich the field and make it more productive. A quote from Bitter’s laboratory dedication speech, composed long before budget concerns caused NML staff to emphasize its practical offshoots, indicates the place he saw it occupying within the scientific community: “The solid-state research program is being transferred from the M.I.T. magnet laboratory to the new facility [the NML]. The aim of this program is to increase knowledge of the basic electrical, magnetic, optical, acoustical, and thermal properties of solids. This fundamental information, pursued for its own sake, has and will continue to provide the basis for the continuing development of new and improved solid-state electronic devices.”14 Concern with establishing an environment in which fundamental research could flourish was at the forefront of Bitter’s thinking. With the NML, he institutionalized his convictions about fundamental research, hoping that its structure would encourage research that could, by focusing relentlessly on the search for general principles, serve as the basis for something more.15 Administrative responsibility was shared among the departments that used the NML. Beyond offering a venue for research using high magnetic fields, the facility provided an interdepartmental forum for MIT scientists and engineers and attracted visiting researchers from other institutions, again in accordance with Bitter’s view that fundamental work should be outward looking. The NML was also an educational space. Bitter had admonished the metallurgical community in 1939 that fundamental advances required that students be trained to ask fundamental questions. In the early 1960s, the NML promoted itself as just such an opportunity for MIT graduate students. A 1963 brochure emphasized this aspect of the lab’s mission, touting the “opportunity to pursue extremely fundamental speculations” that graduate students enjoyed, citing one doctoral student’s work on magnetic field dependence of the velocity of ultrasonic waves in metals.16 By 1965, the lab’s second full year of operation, its thirteen academic staff supported

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twenty-four students, who worked alongside nine researchers from Lincoln Laboratory—a military research lab, which MIT administered—and fifty-six visiting scientists.17 The NML provided the space, resources, community, and pedagogical opportunities necessary for a solid state research facility embodying Bitter’s vision. But Bitter, who was nearing the end of his career and facing health problems, did not take an active role in the lab’s administration. Benjamin Lax became its first director. Lax was Hungarian-born, but had immigrated to the United States in his youth and earned his bachelor’s degree at Cooper Union in 1941. He was drafted while pursuing doctoral work at Brown and arrived at MIT in 1944 as a Radiation Laboratory researcher. He stayed on after the war, completed his PhD in 1949, and joined the Lincoln Laboratory shortly thereafter, rising to head of the Solid State Division in 1958. The selection of Lax as NML director represented the desire to coordinate solid state research across departments. John Slater, who wielded significant influence as an Institute Professor and head of the physics department’s solid state and molecular theory group, wrote to MIT president Julius Stratton as plans for the NML were brewing: “I feel that if we seized the opportunity presented by the Magnet Laboratory, if it goes through, and correlated it with . . . work on solids in the departments of Physics, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, and some of that in Metallurgy, we should have the possibility of building up a solid-state laboratory of great value not only to M.I.T. and the educational program, but to the services and the country as a whole.” Slater advocated grouping representatives from these departments “together with Lax and as much of the Lincoln solid-state group as could possibly be included, in a great cooperative organization, if possible housed together on or close to the campus, and including . . . students, professors, and research scientists of the Lincoln type.”18 Support from figures of Slater’s prominence ensured that the new lab, beyond absorbing the existing magnet program Bitter had established, would seek greater integration of solid state work across MIT’s campus. With institutional support for interdepartmental collaboration secured, Lax carried Bitter’s ethos forward. A 1963 promotional document for the lab asserted: “While the primary emphasis at the National Magnet Laboratory is on the acquisition of basic knowledge concerning the structure of solids, it is a historical fact that work of this nature has led to far reaching technological advances.”19 Lax toed the same line in private correspondence. “I believe it is important for us to provide in the field of basic solid state and applied phys-

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ics, centers of excellence that will contribute to education and to science in a most effective way,” he wrote to Roman Smoluchowski in 1965.20 The argument that investment in basic research, without efforts to shape its direction from without, was the best way to foster useful results was a standard theme in scientific rhetoric by the 1960s, and early on it was a useful justification for the lab. The NML was productive. By December 1965, its thirty-eight staff members had published sixty-one papers that calendar year, with twenty-nine more in press, accepted, or submitted, and had collectively delivered seventynine meeting or colloquium talks. These numbers more than doubled 1963 totals, far outstripping the 18.75 percent staff increase in the same interval.21 Of the sixty-one articles, book chapters, and monographs published in 1965, more than half, thirty-seven, were published in American Institute of Physics journals. Of these, nineteen appeared in the Physical Review or Physical Review Letters, the flagship publications dedicated to basic physical research.22 These articles contributed to major contemporary solid state research trajectories, for instance by examining the band structure of solids and properties of superconductors. Although crude, these data indicate that a large proportion of the lab’s output was dedicated to the type of foundational work Bitter championed. The facility was a strong draw for young talent within the solid state community. Lax found himself with an embarrassment of riches in the mid-1960s and complained to the National Research Council’s Solid State Sciences Panel that despite having “interviewed a greater fraction of first-rate young scientists than we have throughout my entire career . . . with very few exceptions, we reluctantly turned these away.”23 Lax himself won the Oliver E. Buckley Prize in 1960, which, although less than a decade old at that point, was among the most prestigious accolades a solid state physicist could garner. He would be elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1969 largely on the strength of his work at the NML. It was not for want of results that the Air Force’s enthusiasm for the facility began to wane in the mid-1960s. MID-1960S FUNDING PRESSURES

In 1965 the NML administration asked the National Science Foundation to assume financial responsibility for visiting scientist support and a share of both magnet maintenance and research costs from the Air Force. Funding for the laboratory had stalled after its initial ramp-up. Widespread national shortages in basic science funding, coinciding with the escalation of the Viet-

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nam War, became a prod with which to nudge the lab toward a more explicitly applied stance. Lax noted with some alarm the Air Force’s increased interest in the applicable fruits of magnet research in 1967: “This is a complete change from the past when NML was discouraged from including in its charter an applied program.”24 Lloyd A. Wood, director of the physical sciences division within the Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research, substantiated this observation, writing to Lax a month later: “It is as you know becoming more and more an issue in Washington to ‘couple’ federally supported basic research to ‘practical’ enterprises, and a large project such as the Magnet Laboratory has a great opportunity for doing this.”25 An eye on applied benefits was not incompatible with the NML’s stated mission, which had, since Bitter’s early vision, emphasized the importance of basic insight for technological advance. “Coupling” of basic research funding with explicitly practical considerations, however, challenged both Bitter’s conception of fundamental research as conversant with, but independent from, its applications and Lax’s vision for the lab. Lax resisted any reorientation of the NML’s fundamental emphasis. He was happy to accommodate an overtly applied program as long as the Air Force was willing to supply the additional funding, but maintained: “Financially we are in no position to begin such work on our own.”26 Lax also pushed to keep applied projects and their funding insulated from the operations and basic research budgets. He testified before Congress on the transition from Air Force to NSF funding, for instance, that the NML “has always coupled its basic research results with the mission-oriented agencies having the greatest interest in a particular line of development and will continue to do so,” while qualifying that commitment by saying, “When there is a development of special interest to an agency we will solicit support and participation by that agency, whether it be the Air Force or other DOD department, NASA, NIH, or the environmental agencies.”27 Explicitly applied projects were fine, in Lax’s eyes, as long as they did not divert attention or funding from the fundamental work he considered the lab’s raison d’être. As negotiations with the NSF continued through the mid-1960s, the laboratory faced tight budgets and an uncertain future. The NML advisory committee was initially agitated. In February 1966, the committee struck a defiant tone in the face of restrictive budgets, maintaining “the strong opinion that a moderate and orderly expansion of funding is desirable,” and further noting: “It is discouraging and unhealthy for a Laboratory, after a vigorous initial period of building up from zero to a viable state, to be abruptly leveled

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off by budgetary constraints, when large areas of interesting and appropriate research remain.”28 Just over a year later, the committee was more resigned to the difficult environment. An April 1967 report offered less resistance to budgetary stasis, and resignedly noted: “similar budget freezes affect all solid state physics research, if not most scientific research activities in this country at the present time.”29 Other projects that lacked the glitter of high energy physics or the strategic immediacy of nuclear weapons did indeed face similar challenges. In 1969, the budget request from the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, a project under development that the AEC classed as a medium-energy physics project, was slashed by over two-thirds, from $15.3 million to $5 million. The haircut prompted Louis Rosen, the project’s director, to report to Congress the distress the project staff felt “not only because it does not have the best effect on morale, to fluctuate so drastically during the construction of a very complex project, but also because it does not permit us to complete the project in an orderly, efficient, and economical way.”30 Lax, however, was not content to accept the lab’s struggles just because they were symptomatic of larger trends. He vented his frustration to a fellow solid state physicist, Harvard’s Nicolaas Bloembergen: “It is true that there is a budget squeeze all throughout the country, particularly on solid state. However, as it turns out, funds have been found for other areas of physics which are already better funded overall nationally than the solid state activities at the universities. This, in spite of the fact that solid state constitutes by far the largest segment of the physical society.”31 Lax was similarly candid in a May 1967 letter to National Science Foundation director Leland Haworth: “We realize the effects of the Vietnam War and the desire of Congress to spread federal support for research more widely. It is preposterous, however, that the country’s only national facility for high magnetic field research is hamstrung while millions are being spent on redundant facilities in other scientific disciplines.”32 By “redundant facilities,” Lax almost certainly had in mind the National Accelerator Laboratory, plans for which the Atomic Energy Commission had approved just months earlier. Lax, the director of a large, one-ofa-kind solid state research facility was irked that accelerator laboratories were proliferating while his own was being forced to curtail its programs. High energy physics was by no means immune to the budgetary climate of the late 1960s. Major AEC accelerator facilities were forced to reduce their operating time in 1969 because of funding shortages, and the AEC even considered closing some lower-energy facilities. But cuts to high energy research

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were substantially less steep than cuts to other areas of science, largely due to its secure place in the AEC budget.33 Reductions in operating time and concerns about closing smaller and lower-energy facilities did not forestall investment at the forefront of accelerator development in the way Lax felt it was limiting his forefront magnet facility. In what Lax considered a serious concession, the NML’s work did shift in a more applied direction toward the end of the 1960s. In 1968, the eighteen publications by NML staff in the Journal of Applied Physics equaled the combined total of those published in Physical Review and Physical Review Letters.34 An April 1969 Advisory Committee report noted the addition of a program designed to explore medical applications of magnetic fields.35 In the early 1970s, the lab initiated more aspirational applied projects, such as the magneplane, which endeavored to translate the NML’s know-how into a magnet-powered railroad system. The magneplane was a particularly sore point for Lax, who felt it epitomized the concessions the NML had made to Vietnam-era demands for applied payouts from solid state facilities pursuing basic research. On more than one occasion, NML research scientist Henry Kolm, who headed the project, clashed with Lax over the lab’s mission (figure 5.1). In a memo to Lax entitled “Magnetism Applications Projects,” Kolm described himself as “the only strong-minded SOB who has survived in your entourage,” and voiced his frustration with Lax’s disapproval of Kolm’s applied interests: “Our magnetism applications programs are not a concession to expediency, an act of prostitution in the bleak years of 69 to 71. They are a long-neglected obligation of the scientific community. They are giving new relevance to our graduate education, revitalizing our professional stature, and improving the survival chances of the laboratory, of MIT, and of the entire scientific establishment.” Kolm objected to Lax’s contention that the raft of applied projects the lab had acquired siphoned funds from its missioncritical research. In a stark indication of the depth of their disagreement over the NML’s mission and direction, Kolm suggested: “If you find it impossible to integrate a significant applications program into the ‘core’ work of the laboratory in such a way that you and others do not resent its existence, then serious consideration should be give[n] to severing it administratively . . . by creating a new laboratory.”36 No such schism was forthcoming, but the tensions between Lax and Kolm reveal the extent to which changes in federal science policy challenged the NML’s mission, with help from within. Lax, who administered in accordance

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Figure 5.1. Henry Kolm, Pyotr Kapitsa, and Benjamin Lax, 1970s. Lax (right) and Kolm (left) converse with the visiting Soviet low-temperature physicist Kapitsa, with whom Francis Bitter had worked at the Cavendish during his time in Cambridge. Credit: MIT Archives and Special Collections, NMLR, box 2, folder 12. Reproduced with permission

with Bitter’s vision of fundamental research, was shaken by the need to take on applied projects for their own sake. Kolm, representing a younger generation, was less ideologically opposed to adding applied objectives to the laboratory’s mission. Unlike large high energy physics facilities, which were driven by the unanimity of purpose required to construct a large facility directed at a single theoretical program, the NML faced pressures on its basic research mission on two fronts. The solid state community remained factionalized, and those who preferred the field to be responsive to technological possibilities and needs fought to have their own vision reflected in its large facilities. CONTRASTING THE NATIONAL MAGNET LABORATORY AND THE NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY

By 1971 the NML—renamed the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory in November 1967, following Bitter’s death—had found more stable, if not more generous, financial support from the NSF. Its struggles through the late

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1960s and early 1970s are telling: Francis Bitter’s view of fundamentality, although realizable in a major research laboratory, did not fare as well in the larger funding environment. The Air Force, its enthusiasm for facilities devoted to nonapplied work dwindling, began transferring responsibility to a civilian agency, limiting the lab’s expansion, well before the 1970 and 1973 Mansfield Amendments, which required Department of Defense–funded research to connect clearly with short-term objectives, compelled such a transfer on a larger scale.37 As the NML struggled, high-energy particle accelerators thrived, even if some smaller particle physics facilities faced the prospect of cuts and closure. Unlike solid state physicists, who could not justify a large facility without invoking potential practical outcomes, particle physicists reaped large-scale expenditures based on the promise of fundamental knowledge. Wolfgang Panofsky could claim before Congress in 1964 that “no scientist can point a finger at this time to the specific way in which the study of high-energy physics can and will affect our immediate environment, our health and safety, our productivity, or any human affairs” without jeopardizing funding for the Stanford Linear Accelerator.38 Similarly, the future NAL director Robert R. Wilson famously told the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1969 that the proposed accelerator “has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending,” and insisted that the search for fundamental physical knowledge provided the same culturally ennobling qualities as art and literature.39 This response of Wilson’s, to a question from John O. Pastore, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, is often quoted to indicate the commitment of high energy physics to fundamental knowledge and the disdain for militarism characteristic of the field’s culture, and to illustrate a principled stand against the encroachment of defense interest into basic physics—suggesting that high energy physics was under fierce assault by both military and budget hawks. But Pastore, a strong supporter of the NAL, asked about defense only as an afterthought to a larger discussion about the rhetoric of justifying hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of expenditures on aspirational physics programs while the country wrestled with poverty, homelessness, and hunger. “I want to get these Congressmen off my back,” he remarked later in the hearing, referring to some resistance to the project from within the appropriations committee, on which he sat.40 Wilson’s famous quote followed an exchange between Pastore and Paul W. McDaniel, director of the AEC’s research division, in which Pastore pressed McDaniel to clarify the merits of the NAL:

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Senator PASTORE. For the purpose of the record, are you prepared to say, or is this a fair question, what you expect to find through the 200 Bev [accelerator]? Dr. McDANIEL. A better understanding of the subnuclear universe, is my general answer. My specific answer is we do not know what we will find, but we know there is a wealth of information there which needs to be developed. Senator PASTORE. And with all these other priorities of hunger, underfeeding, underclothing, and underhousing, how do you justify $250 million at this time for building something with which we don’t know what we are going to find? Dr. McDANIEL. I would simply say as an individual that is a small amount in comparison to the total capacity of this country to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked. Senator PASTORE. I don’t like that answer, at all. These are the arguments we get when we go before the Appropriations Committee, and it is usually my responsibility to carry the ball on this. I would like to have some definitive answers here as to priorities, because that is going to be thrown right into my face. Here we are. We have these Senators going all over the District of Columbia. It has been on the front pages. They are going all over the country showing how many people are starving, how many people are hungry, how many people live in rat-ridden houses. Here we are, asking for $250 million to build a machine that is an experimental machine, in fundamental high energy physics, and we cannot be told exactly what we are trying to find out through that machine.41

It was at this juncture that Wilson jumped in, citing both the cultural importance of the search for fundamental physical principles and the social benefits that had come from nuclear power as reasons to fund forefront research in high energy physics. Wilson moved the committee, which was favorably disposed to his cause. Chester E. Holifield, Democratic representative from California and chair of the committee, gushed, “As I listened to your eloquent appeal for this, my mind went back before the days of Enrico Fermi to a time when St. Paul stood before King Agrippa, and King Agrippa said to St. Paul that he wanted him

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to explain his belief in the Christian principles. St. Paul was so eloquent that when he got through, King Agrippa said, ‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.’ I am saying that, leaving out the “almost.” I am saying, ‘Thou hast persuadest me to support this to the best of my ability.’” Pastore, again taking the pragmatic line, quipped, “I was not worrying about Agrippa. I was a little worried about the taxpayers a-griping,” but reaffirmed his commitment to the project.42 Wilson’s long-term justification for the project mirrored the rhetoric Francis Bitter and Benjamin Lax had used on behalf of the NML. He reassured the committee of his “firm expectation that technological developments will come. Directly, but after a very long time; from the results of the research will come new technology.”43 But whereas high energy physicists in the late 1960s could get away with reaching for the distant promise of applicable outcomes, and providing only vague accounts of the expected intellectual outputs from historically large laboratories, other areas of science were pressed to articulate more direct and immediate relevance and, if they wanted to justify nonapplied work, had to fight to keep more proximate applications at arm’s length. For solid state physics, that meant increased pressure to tighten its connection with technological development, even in sui generis facilities constructed on the big science model. By the late 1960s, science of all stripes was being asked to be more responsive to social demands. The fact that Fermilab, despite its self-confessed remoteness from both military and social concerns, could still thrive in this environment indicates the privileged place high energy physics had managed to secure. High energy physicists, ambivalent over military and economic justifications for their research in the face of 1960s protest movements, widely embraced the high-minded rhetoric of fundamentality that Wilson’s congressional testimony epitomized. They were successful in casting particle physics as “a grand cultural enterprise, elegant and profound, that deserved the support of society.”44 That avenue to funding, especially large-scale government funding, was not available to solid state physicists, who by the 1960s were already too closely associated with technology in the imaginations of federal funders. The pure science vision around which Bitter had built the NML failed to fill the lab’s coffers. Five-year plans and annual reports to the Air Force stressing the NML’s fundamental contributions could not replicate the rhetorical success of Wilson’s eloquence on behalf of the NAL. Faced with this failure, the NML’s solid state physicists felt slighted by the comparatively more se-

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vere funding shortfalls they suffered and resented the emerging perception in the particle physics community that fundamental knowledge could only be derived from the ultimate constituents of matter and energy. These frustrations extended beyond the walls of the NML. At the dawn of the 1970s, solid state physics was a mature discipline, confident in its ability to generate fundamental scientific knowledge, but it was in the midst of an identity crisis exacerbated by unfavorable comparisons to its more lauded siblings.

6 SOLID STATE AND MATERIALS SCIENCE

Departmental allegiances and power drives do not easily go in solution and crystallize out a new university pattern of interdepartmental cooperation. —ARTHUR R. VON HIPPEL, 1969

In 1970, Albert M. Clogston, the director of the Physical Research Laboratory at Bell Labs, became chair of the American Physical Society’s newly formed Committee on Problems of Physics and Society. The petition that led to this committee reached the American Physical Society (APS) council in 1969, motivated by a sense that the rapid growth and specialization of American physics had narrowed the focus of many physicists and made it more difficult for the APS and its members to consider the many and wide-ranging connections between physical research and social problems and processes.1 One of its first tasks was a report on the economic concerns of physicists, which Clogston authored. “Five years ago it would have seemed incredible that in 1970 American physicists would be seriously concerned about the economic well-being of their profession,” Clogston began his essay, introducing a clear-eyed discussion of how the funding shifts described in the previous chapter translated into concrete challenges for American physicists. New PhDs struggled to land job offers. Many found themselves in temporary positions, without the promise of transitioning into permanent lines. Industry, previously eager to enlist physicists in development efforts, had soured on the promise of basic research to enhance the bottom line and was turning increasingly to engineers.

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These circumstances revived the old identity concerns of the 1940s, for solid state physicists in particular. To address the economic problems brought on by funding shortfalls, Clogston maintained, “the physics community needs to redefine in a general way what are the unique characteristics of a physicist.” Unlike the 1940s, however, when identity concerns were marked by ambivalence and hesitancy about how closely technological applications should be linked to the core mission of physics, Clogston worried in 1970 that the link was not clear enough to ensure the economic well-being of the discipline.2 Clogston had reason for concern. By the late 1960s, the luster that the Manhattan Project had given to basic physical research had faded and federal funders were much more hardheaded about how they distributed their largesse. The rollback of government and especially military funds reflected growing skepticism about the return on investment from funding basic scientific research. Project Hindsight, a Department of Defense (DOD) review panel begun in 1963, assayed the efficacy of DOD-sponsored research programs. The first interim report, released in 1966, foreshadowed the final report’s conclusions, observing that the “contribution from recent undirected science to the systems we have studied appears to have been small,” and encouraged “alternative practices in the management of scientific research” on the basis of the conclusion that “the length of time to utilization of scientific findings is decreased when the scientist is working in areas related to the problems of his sponsor.”3 The first Mansfield Amendment of 1970 was consonant with the conclusions of Project Hindsight, requiring DOD-funded research to have direct defense applications. What could physicists offer in this environment and how could they offer it? One answer came in the form of the new, interdisciplinary field of materials science.4 In some critical respects, solid state physics can be understood as a historical antecedent to materials science. First, solid state physics, along with engineering, chemistry, and metallurgy, was one of the ingredients of the disciplinary stew that became materials science. Second, like the solid state of matter, “materials” is a category too diffuse to offer much in the way of conceptual consistency. And like solid state physics, materials science came into being in response to a contingent set of factors that had little to do with the conceptual development of the research programs composing it. In the case of solid state physics, those factors had to do with the professional challenges of a growing physics community. In the case of materials science, they had to do with the strategic, economic, and military realities of the Cold War. The

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growth of materials science is therefore relevant to understand the influence of solid state physics on the rest of Cold War science, both because the understanding of material systems solid state physics offered was deemed important for meeting the development objectives toward which material science was oriented, and because materials science followed in solid state’s footsteps by creating a new field on the basis of local, contingent, and nonconceptual objectives. This chapter follows the establishment and growth of materials science, and solid state’s place within it, in order to understand the evolution of venues and audiences for solid state physicists’ technical aspirations. Becoming a discipline within physics required changing some long- and dearly held assumptions about the identity of physics, but it also required buying into those assumptions to a limited extent. As a subfield of physics, therefore, solid state was not the appropriate venue for a single-minded program of technical development—the DOD had determined as much with its less than sanguine assessment of the practical payoffs of basic physical research. These circumstances were favorable for the emergence of a new forum in which solid state physics might pursue technical development in collaboration with other disciplines. Materials science provided just such a venue. In the 1950s, many federal funders became convinced that neither empirically driven engineering efforts, nor principle-based physical investigations were adequate to address the technical challenges of Cold War development. The rhetoric that these two components needed to be linked developed over the course of the 1950s within the burgeoning federal advisory system. It was within committees of the National Academy of Science, the Office of Naval Research, and others, that the argument was developed for putting solid state physics into conversation with “materials research,” which, through the late 1950s, was largely an engineering specialty. That argument would be operationalized most forcefully by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a military research and development organization that did the most to define materials science by founding a series of interdisciplinary laboratories on American campuses, which effected the collaboration between these branches of science and engineering by physically colocating otherwise scattered university research groups. By 1975, when the Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering (COSMAT) published its sprawling report on the status and direction of materials science, Materials and Man’s Needs, the fates of solid state phys-

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ics and materials science were intertwined, with the consequence that materials science had become a thoroughly interdisciplinary exercise, and that solid state physics had found a further way to realize Smoluchowski’s vision of it as an outward-looking, collaborative field attuned to its technological potential. MATERIALS RESEARCH BEFORE MATERIALS SCIENCE

“Materials” became a fixation of the US federal advisory system in the 1950s. As distinguished from the more generic term “matter,” “materials” refers to the stuff of technological development, with properties that answer some proximate need. Those needs were many in the early Cold War. Air and watercraft, communications apparatus, energy and weapons systems, and consumer technologies all faced material constraints, and so research into new and improved materials presented strategic opportunities. It was not immediately evident to those pursuing these strategic goals, however, how physics might be relevant to these ends. In 1951, the National Research Council (NRC) formed a Materials Advisory Board (MAB) to evaluate how advances in materials research might address strategic bottlenecks, particularly in military development. MAB grew from the older Minerals and Metals Advisory Board. The name change reflected “recognition of the interrelations of the metals and nonmetals, particularly in structural applications.” But despite the broadened scope of the new committee, MAB’s early 1950s iteration had little contact with physicists. A 1954 report described the change by noting: “The Board has been reconstituted to include materials engineers, chemists, and metallurgists . . . to provide advisory services to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development and to the Administrator of the General Services Administration.”5 Other early uses of “materials research” are similarly engineering-centric. Military research organizations followed the NRC’s lead, cementing materials research as a prominent target for Cold War research and development. The restriction to engineering began to erode toward the end of the decade as MAB honed its mission, installed physicists in influential roles, and embraced the relevance of basic research in a limited fashion. A 1957–58 NRC report noted that “increased attention to materials brought about by the needs of weapons system development has resulted in a considerable expansion of activity for the Materials Advisory Board.”6 The expansion referenced here did not just indicate new personnel, but also voices from new disciplinary camps.

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The inclusion of physicists, most of whom hailed from the newly vibrant field of solid state physics, coincided with a marked shift in the emphasis of materials research. MAB’s expanded topical breadth is evident in its 1960 report, “Fundamental Aspects of Materials Research.” The committee included Cornell physicist James Krumhansl as deputy chair. The presence of a physicist among the metallurgists, chemists, and industry mavens who previously composed the committee indicates MAB’s emerging preference for close connections between basic research and its applications, a position that was overt and urgent by 1960. The committee criticized the Department of Defense’s existing efforts to mobilize basic research to strategic ends, remarking that “in-house basic research capability is grossly inadequate.” The committee urged the research arms of the army, navy, and air force to sponsor “strong centralized laboratories in which basic research, comprising the entire spectrum of potentially pertinent science including the materials sciences, can be promoted.”7 These recommendations, designed to enhance “the ability to bring knowledge to bear on the defense needs of the nation in the shortest possible time,” came to define the mission of materials science as it was imagined within the federal advisory infrastructure.8 The concept of basic research was appropriated in service of technological defense needs, which were not being addressed with alacrity sufficient to appease the Department of Defense and its army of advisers. Responding to pressure to mobilize basic research resources in order to accelerate blackboard-to-battlefield turnaround, the NRC broadened its conception of materials science still further. In 1960, a committee to consider the “Scope and Conduct of Materials Research” was formed “to view the total materials research needs of the country with relation both to national defense and the public welfare more generally; to appraise the adequacy of present research programs to meet those needs; to consider the resources of personnel, facilities, and administration that are available; and to make recommendations for the correction of deficiencies that the Committee may identify.”9 Alongside the regular complement of engineers, chemists, and industrialists, this committee included solid state physicist Frederick Seitz and metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith, the director of the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Metals, a prominent center of solid state research. The report’s recommendations reflected a closer integration between science and engineering. It advocated centralized funding, coordination, and oversight of

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materials research as well as “strengthening the universities in their dual role of training scientists and engineers and also doing basic research.”10 By 1960, scientists advising the federal government regularly advocated mechanisms to increase dialogue between those studying the properties of materials and those implementing that knowledge in strategically relevant ways. The advisory emphasis on materials, in particular with respect to training and basic research, exerted its influence within American universities. The first major textbook for materials scientists and engineers appeared in 1959: Lawrence Van Vlack’s Elements of Materials Science aimed to synthesize traditional engineering approaches with basic science. Van Vlack informed his readers: “The subject matter taught in Engineering Materials courses is changing rapidly. Formerly, this subject was taught on an empirical basis. Now, although the science of materials is far from complete, it can be approached from a more scientific viewpoint, because of the development of principles which relate the properties and behavior of many materials to their structures and environments.” Nonetheless, the volume remained focused toward the needs of engineers: “This introductory text . . . is designed for freshman and sophomore engineering students with a background in general physics and chemistry; it does not use the rigorous approach which is common in solid state physics books.”11 True to Van Vlack’s description, the textbook is light on formalism, opting to deliver content through prose, pictures, and diagrams, appealing to visually and mechanically oriented engineering students. As both the trajectory of MAB and Van Vlack’s textbook indicate, use of the term “materials science” to identify a research area, originally restricted to engineering, began to expand by the late 1950s. MAB came to advocate for the desirability of increased contributions from basic science to address strategic technical goals, reflecting the federal government’s emphasis on the challenges of material constraints in the military and space programs that would be amplified after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 in 1957. But materials research was still firmly ensconced in an engineering tradition through the end of the 1950s, a state of affairs that would change in the early to mid-1960s, when materials science emerged as a sui generis interdisciplinary experiment. THE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY AND THE INTERDISCIPLINARY LABORATORIES

The Advanced Research Projects Agency, founded in 1958, hastened the transition toward an interdisciplinary definition of materials science.12 One

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of ARPA’s first large-scale funding initiatives supported a series of universityhosted interdisciplinary laboratories (IDLs) dedicated to the study of materials. The IDLs prompted universities to collapse departmental divisions within the context of materials science, creating sites where students could be acculturated to think broadly about problems related to materials and their limiting effect on technological development. Within these IDLs, the technical, scientific, and administrative character of materials science began to take shape. ARPA’s call for proposals reflected the 1950s-era advisory emphasis on materials as a bottleneck for strategic development. “The Government,” it insisted, “has a vital stake in the establishment of the best possible materials research and development program. This is true because materials are a limiting factor in the performance of the advanced systems and devices essential to the operations and missions of Government agencies and departments.” The next paragraph indicated ARPA’s intent to expand upon the materials science concept: “In order to strengthen basic research in materials sciences . . . the Government decided to support the establishment of a number of interdisciplinary materials research laboratories in universities. The objective of this Interdisciplinary Laboratory Program is to expand the national program of basic research and training in the materials sciences.”13 Given ARPA’s emphasis on attacking technological limitations by training students, it is notable that the agency chose to promote the development of a new interdisciplinary field, rather than to support efforts in existing disciplines, such as solid state physics, which already maintained a similar balance between basic and applied aims. Materials science grew from the same type of synthesis between research on metals and nonmetals as solid state, but solid state, which staunchly maintained its physics bona fides, was not serving defense needs as ARPA saw them. Materials science, as it coalesced within ARPA’s IDLs did, however, mimic the strategy solid state had pioneered of organizing a new discipline to address contingent contemporary needs. These needs were professional in the case of solid state and technological in the case of materials science, but they similarly sacrificed close cohesion to other ends. Twelve universities won IDL contracts between 1960 and 1962. The first three were hosted at Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern University, with the remainder appearing in quick succession at the University of Chicago, Brown University, Harvard University, the University of Maryland, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Uni-

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versity of North Carolina, Purdue University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois–Urbana.14 ARPA funds prompted these institutions to consolidate their materials research efforts, which were often scattered across several departments and distant campus locations, in centralized “Materials Science Centers,” generating early examples of the “center model” described by Cyrus Mody and Hyungsub Choi.15 The Massachusetts Institute of  Technology provides an apt case study. John C. Slater spearheaded MIT’s IDL application. Slater, like John Van Vleck, earned his PhD at Harvard under Edwin Kemble in the early 1920s and represented the first generation of domestically trained quantum theorists.16 By the 1950s, he was an Institute Professor of Physics—the first at MIT to be granted this honorary title. He devoted the bulk of his time to a research program in solid state and molecular theory, which used the latest digital computers to attempt calculations of the properties of solids and molecules from first principles. Slater maintained a strong commitment to a research program rooted in the physics department. Four of the five faculty members affiliated with the solid state and molecular theory group were physicists—Slater, László Tisza, George F. Koster, and Michael P. Barnett—and one, Walter R. Thorson, was a chemist. Slater’s ab initio approach used the most recent digital computing technology to calculate wave functions for solids and molecules with as few simplifications as possible. Known as “Slater physics” around the institute campus, this approach proved too abstract for the teaching needs of MIT’s engineering department, which brought Mildred Dresselhaus from Lincoln Laboratory to develop a course in solid state theory for engineers in 1967.17 Slater was nevertheless in tune with the collaborative, interdepartmental efforts that characterized MIT’s research culture in the 1950s. In his correspondence with ARPA administrator John F. Kincaid, Slater identified “Aeronautics and Astronautics, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Metallurgy, Naval Architecture, and Physics” as the departments in which materials research was conducted.18 Slater, conscious of the emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration within advisory circles, took pains to emphasize this aspect of MIT’s existing research programs. MIT’s initial proposal to ARPA was titled “The Interdisciplinary Nature of M.I.T. Research,” and asserted that “[o]ne of the fundamental features of our proposal relates to the way in which we expect the various disciplines to cooperate in the research.”19 The proposal leaned on the record MIT had established promoting connections between departments, emphasizing in

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particular the Laboratory for Insulation Research (LIR), founded in 1940, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), founded after the Second World War to preserve facilities, equipment, and programs associated with wartime radar research.20 Slater was equally attuned to ARPA’s interest in graduate training, reassuring Kincaid: “We feel that establishment of interdisciplinary laboratories would be the best way to encourage expansion in graduate training and research.”21 The neat correspondence between Slater’s rhetoric and ARPA ideals might be read as cynical kowtowing to a funder’s demands if not for the similar initiatives that had been under way at the institute prior to ARPA’s call for proposals. In October of 1958, Slater circulated a memo reporting “a good deal of discussion of the desirability of some mechanism for getting closer liaison between persons in various departments of the Institute interested in solid-state and molecular science,” and indicating broad support from “members of the chemistry, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, and physics departments.”22 The commitment to cross-department collaboration at MIT is evident as far back as the early 1940s, when the institute began mobilizing its resources for war work. Arthur von Hippel, the force behind the Laboratory for Insulation Research commented in 1942: There is no real boundary between physics and electrical engineering. Our field is a branch of applied physics mainly concerned still with the applications of Maxwell’s theory. While the physicist stood “clean” of such useful tasks and strove for insight, the electrical engineer built a new economy and talked in a new technical language appropriate for his tools. Thus the link between the two was wearing thin, until events forced both sides into closer co-operation. The physicist began to toss into the domain of the electrical engineer new instruments, such as thermionic tubes and photocells, rectifiers, thermistors, and fluorescent lamps, which could not be understood on the old classical basis. And the electrical engineer replied in kind with magic eyes, complex impedance bridges, high-frequency generators, high-voltage machines, and magnets for cyclotrons, which revolutionized the experimental technique of the physicist.

In consequence, according to von Hippel, “The fence between the two fields [physics and electrical engineering] is falling into disrepair.”23 The LIR was von Hippel’s prime example of MIT’s conviction that departmental divides could impede progress.

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Following in that tradition, MIT scientists had been itching for a more consolidated materials program since the pre-ARPA 1950s, when a proposal for an expanded program of materials research was compiled at the behest of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1956.24 The proposal recorded a total of 88,020 square feet distributed over nine departments, serving 87 academic staff and 419 support personnel. It called for consolidating these efforts in a 100,000-square-foot Materials Research Laboratory, which would promote a “more fundamental approach” to material limitations on development.25 By the time of the ARPA proposal, the estimate for the size needed to accommodate campus-wide materials science efforts had more than tripled to 350,000 square feet, indicating both the growth of materials research at MIT and the expansion of its scope in the intervening years.26 At MIT and elsewhere, ARPA provided the infrastructure to make consolidation feasible on a large scale. Slater wrote to Kincaid with a frank assessment of MIT’s physical constraints: “At present all of our work in materials research is very crowded, and we could hardly expand at all in number of students in some parts of the field without providing additional building space. To accommodate all the work in the field, on the scale on which we should like to operate, would require a building of approximately 350,000 square feet gross floor space. This would cost something like $14,000,000 to build.”27 When APRA funded an IDL at MIT in 1961, it included a 200,000-square-foot building.28 Although this fell short of full consolidation, it provided the institute with a crucible large enough to cook up a stable interdisciplinary field. The physical spaces ARPA provided were disciplinary laboratories as well as materials research laboratories.29 They hosted a nationwide experiment in interdisciplinary collaboration, out of which the field of materials science slowly emerged. A memorandum sent from ARPA to its IDLs in 1962 described the terms of the experiment: “As you know, we have undertaken the responsibility of initiating a program in the national interest with universities for ‘basic research and graduate education’ in a somewhat loosely defined area called material sciences. You have to a great extent defined what is meant—at least in your university—by material sciences by listing in your proposals to us the names of individuals you believe to be the core of the program at your institution. The collective research interests of these individuals defines in more detail material sciences.”30 For ARPA, defining materials science was an empirical question, with the caveat that the goals of the field were established in advance. “Materials sciences” referred to the collabora-

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tions that proved productive according to the standards determined by the IDL program’s objectives. The inclusion of solid state physics in this disciplinary experiment underwrote ARPA’s assertion that it was concerned with basic research. By maintaining its identity within physics, solid state retained a claim, however contentious it would become, to being a fundamental scientific discipline. That claim made it useful to materials science, which tried in part to set down a smooth stretch of pavement traversing the arduous path between theoretical insight and practical mastery. ARPA’s long-term success promulgating this picture is evident in a 1987 survey text, which represented solid state physics as “at the core of nearly all fields, while Materials Science embraces the wider application of the basic studies.”31 The forging of materials science within ARPA’s IDLs represented the large-scale adoption of solid state’s heterodox approach to defining professional categories. ARPA started with a set of concrete objectives: to consolidate research on materials from a range of disciplinary standpoints and to train students within this new synthesis. It then promoted the formation of a field to address those objectives, showing no regard for whether or not the field that emerged obeyed traditional boundaries. In doing so, it created a space in which a portion of the solid state community could make a home and cement the case for its utility. At the same time, it exacerbated the underlying tensions between those who championed solid state’s technical relevance and those who sought to position it as a fundamental field of physics. On one hand, the alliance with materials science represented the potential of solid state physics to secure reliable, federal support by reinforcing its relevance to the problems of the age. On the other hand, it represented the danger of straying from physics, and thus losing a claim to the intellectual mission that, despite the progress solid state had made in making physics as a whole more responsive to its social milieu, continued to sit at the heart of the American physicists’ identity. MATERIALS AND MAN’S NEEDS

An often-repeated witticism of uncertain provenance insists that “anything with science in its name isn’t.”32 Materials science is in some respects a confirming instance. The treatment of the subject in Materials and Man’s Needs, a National Academy of Science (NAS) panel report, illustrates how. Also known as the COSMAT (for Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering) report, it opened with a covering letter from Melvin Calvin,

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chair of the NAS Committee on Science and Public Policy, to NAS president Philip Handler. Calvin pointed out that, unlike NAS reports on other disciplines, which emphasized the potential for scientific advance in those fields, the COSMAT report would focus on needs, and how to meet them. Materials, as a category, were defined by their usefulness, so any field oriented around them would have an essential engineering component.33 But even if materials science could not be properly understood as a science, it became gradually more scientistic through the 1960s and early 1970s. As Cyril Stanley Smith remarked in 1968, “Even in the field where he was once supreme because he alone could make or build, the engineer is currently losing status to the scientist.”34 The growth of “materials science,” in contrast to “materials research,” did signal a meaningful change, namely the growing prevalence of solid state physicists and chemists—who maintained their identity as such, even while contributing to materials science—in what had previously been an area dominated by metallurgists, technicians, and engineers. Even in the mid-1970s, however, after the first of ARPA’s IDLs had been open for over a decade, the direct practical payoff of bringing the basic sciences into materials sciences was less than clear. The COSMAT report acknowledged: “Despite the many impressive achievements of materials research there is the awareness that only the surface of scientific capability has been scratched. The majority of advances have historically been made via the empirical approach. Most new materials or properties are arrived at or discovered by cut-and-try methods—new chemical or alloy compositions are prepared and characterized and their various properties are determined. There are usually underlying rationales or phenomenological models to this empirical approach but it is rare indeed for a new material or property to be predicted from basic principles.” However, the report continued: “The principal exception to this situation is in the area of single crystal materials, particularly those used in solid state electronics. On the other hand, techniques and concepts of physical science are often essential for characterizing and reproducing the properties of even empirically-invented materials. With electronic materials, due to the combined talents of chemists, metallurgists, physicists and electrical engineers a degree of understanding has been achieved, at least for the simpler crystals, so that material compositions having the desired physical properties can often be prescribed beforehand.”35 By the mid1970s, in other words, the merits of adopting a principle-first approach to materials development were still largely notional. Materials and Man’s Needs, in fact, expresses considerable frustration

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about the difficulty of translating theoretical solid state work into practical payoffs, repeatedly citing the need for more research to bridge the gap between a broad scientific understanding of material structure and behavior on one hand and the tools to predict usable material properties within reasonable tolerances on the other. Aside from a few cases in which the properties of simple crystals could be predicted in advance, theoretical understanding was still too crude for solid state to offer much of a practical aid to the complex and iterative process of materials development. This is not to say that the technical relevance of solid state physics was oversold, simply that the route from theoretical understanding to practical application was somewhat more meandering than ARPA had supposed when it envisioned its IDLs as high-output factories for strategic materials. Successes in such direct application of theory to practice were few. These few narrow areas of success, however, were enough to justify the systematic approach of encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration around the nexus of materials that ARPA had spearheaded in the early 1960s. The COSMAT panel recommended that universities increase interdisciplinary activities in both research and education, and that the federal government continue support for the materials research centers that might host such activities. Evaluating the COSMAT panel’s stance and recommendations reveals that the materials science alliance had as much to do with institutional convenience as it did with improving research into practical needs. It had been dreamed up by ARPA in order to provide answers to technical questions, and it certainly did so. But it is not clear to what extent its answers were systematically better than those that engineers might have achieved working in comparative isolation, if they were given access to a similar degree of funding. Materials science did, however, offer mutually beneficial professional rewards for both its old and new constituent disciplines. Materials engineers were able to associate themselves with the status that scientific research had attained and fend off criticisms of their empirical, phenomenological methods as inadequate for the task at hand. Scientists for their part, and solid state physics in particular, found a steady stream of financial and institutional support at time when funding for basic research was becoming harder to secure. FRIENDS OF CONVENIENCE

By the 1960s, having lasted through the institutional growing pains of the APS and a shakeup of the publishing landscape, solid state was securely ensconced in the American physics community. In 1949, I. I. Rabi had

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suggested that divisions of the APS were only necessary for “‘peripheral’ fields.”36 By the end of the 1960s, both nuclear physics and particle physics had divisions of their own. The early postwar order, in which a collection of new interest groups orbited a core of physics that carried on the ideals of the early twentieth century, and at some remove, was dissolving. Largely on the success of solid state physics and related enterprises, the influence of the APS had broadened to the point that the fields that carried on traditional pure science ideals were on a par with the newer, more technically adventurous subfields, in institutional if not absolute terms. The alliance between physics and materials science would eventually lead, in 1990, to the APS establishing a Division of Materials Physics, promoting to divisional status a topical group that had formed in 1986. At that point, 70 percent of the topical group’s 2,869 members were also members of the Division of Condensed Matter Physics (the name for the Division of Condensed Matter Physics from 1978 on; see chapter 8), but the emphases of the two groups had become sufficiently different that the APS executive committee determined that a new division was justified.37 The acknowledgment of the explicitly applied category of “materials” as a full-fledged topic of physics reflects a softening of attitudes toward applied physics that began within the APS in the early 1970s. The APS council, responding to the challenging funding situation in 1970, issued a statement that cast physicists as deeply concerned with the consequences of their work: “The problems we face as a nation call for more knowledge, not less; and better technology. Better technology must be based on more extensive understanding of scientific facts and possibilities.”38 The society did demure in 1972 when offered charter membership in the Federation of Materials Societies, judging that organization’s interests to be aligned more closely with engineering than with science, but it authorized the Division of Solid State Physics (DSSP) to participate in the federation as an observer.39 In 1974, the APS approved an IBM-sponsored prize for new materials.40 In 1975, a new standing committee on the applications of physics convened for the first time, responding to a strong sense that recognition and respect for applied physics, both from other physicists and from the wider society, needed to be improved.41 The friendlier approach to technology, and active censuring of the snobbish attitude toward applied physics that the APS acknowledges was deeply rooted in the culture of American physics, was in large measure a response to financial pressures. The notional long-term relevance of basic research, which had sufficed to justify liberal military spending on science in the two decades

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or so after the Second World War, proved insufficient to justify continued annual increases in research budgets. For most physicists, and especially for solid state physicists, this meant reevaluating their notion of relevance and exploring new avenues for making that relevance known. Materials science emerged in opportune coincidence with these developments. Skepticism about the payoff from funding basic research encouraged the proliferation of the interdisciplinary approach to science funding that ARPA had pioneered—if basic research typically bore fruit on the scale of decades, perhaps that timeline could be foreshortened by forcing closer contact between basic and applied fields. That attitude, combined with solid state’s institutional security within physics, allowed solid state physicists to participate in the materials science experiment en masse without jeopardizing their identity as physicists in a way that would have been difficult in the 1950s. The COSMAT report estimated that 2,211 PhD-holding solid state physicists were involved in materials science. The same report estimated those solid state physicists as constituting 13.6 percent of all PhD scientists participating in materials science. Just over twice that number were members of the DSSP that same year. The total membership of the APS in 1973 was 27,291.42 Materials science, in other words, constituted a substantial proportion of what solid state physicists did by the early 1970s. Support from ARPA, the NSF, and other federal agencies that targeted materials allowed solid state physicists to increase their base of financial support after the initial exuberance for funding science after the Second World War began to wane.43 This alignment ensured an abundance of support for the field in troubled financial times and helped pull physics as a whole, by sheer force of numbers, in more relevant directions. The alliance likewise pulled materials research toward the sciences. Materials research in the early 1950s was a largely empirical engineering discipline. But if the advisory apparatus was sour on stand-alone basic research, it was equally skeptical of stand-alone engineering. Interdisciplinary collaboration was in vogue. Basic science enjoyed a unique epistemic cachet, even in the face of concerns that it did not produce results fast enough and against the background of Vietnam-era concerns that physics, especially, was morally unmoored. The federal advisory system now saw physics (and solid state in particular) as an essential component of technical development, albeit one that was not living up to its potential. Welcoming solid state physics therefore helped transform materials research into materials science and thereby elevate its standing. The alliance between solid state physics and materials

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science, that is, formed amid the rhetoric of technological relevance, but was driven less by the demonstrated outcomes of collaborations between disciplines than it was by the professional advantage each could gain from the others. A strong physics presence in materials science was possible because solid state physics had succeeded in establishing itself firmly within physics, and had broadened the identity of American physics in doing so. The decision to remain closely tied to the core concerns of physics paid off for both solid state and physics as a whole as the ground shifted under their feet and the context demanded greater responsiveness to immediate technical needs. Nevertheless, pure science remained a powerful regulative ideal, even for solid state physics, and the technical turn of the late 1960s and early 1970s would spark a backlash. The next two chapters consider how solid state physicists fought to hold on to their identity as fundamental researchers in an environment determined to understand their value in strictly technical terms.

7 RESPONSES TO THE REDUCTIONIST WORLDVIEW

In general, our physical world, the world that affects us as human beings, is a low-energy world, not a high-energy world. —ALVIN WEINBERG, 1964

During the 1960s, the pure science ideal took on a particularly virulent form within the high energy physics community. Reductionism emerged as the dominant philosophy among those seeking to understand the phenomena observed in cloud chambers, bubble chambers, and other new instruments that rendered the invisible microworld visible. It held that all theoretical knowledge about the world rested on, and was in some sense contained within, the rules governing the elemental components of matter and energy; everything else, logically speaking, boiled down to those basic laws and concepts. Establishing a reductionist research program differentiated high energy physics from nuclear and atomic physics, with which it shared a conceptual ancestry. In the 1960s, accelerator physicists began to speak of two frontiers: an energy frontier and an intensity frontier. Exploring the former required building larger machines with higher beam energies, which facilitated probing the smallest constituents of matter. The latter called for accelerators that crammed more particles into smaller spaces, generating more collisions and more complex interactions, favoring experiments that explored particle dynamics. In the early 1960s, these twin frontiers were seen as complementary. Stanford experimentalist Wolfgang Panofsky, speaking before Congress in support of funding for the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), a lower-

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energy, higher-intensity accelerator, could state that “the different types of accelerators are not in competition with one another.”1 That would remain true only as long as liberal federal funding was available to meet the demands of both programs. By 1968, when M. Stanley Livingstone, coinventor of the cyclotron, titled his elementary particle physics textbook Particle Physics: The High-Energy Frontier, that was no longer the case. “The high-energy frontier has become the financial-support frontier,” Livingstone wrote, defending expenditures on large-scale accelerators on the basis of “value to our society of this new knowledge about nature” that discoveries at the high-energy frontier would presumably yield.2 The particle physics community, by the late 1960s, had bet their chips on high energies as their best chance to ensure ongoing federal support and the international preeminence of American particle physics.3 The reductionist worldview justified pursuing the energy frontier at the expense of the intensity frontier. It sought to bestow exclusive jurisdiction over fundamental physics to particle physicists, in their pursuit of elementary particles and the forces governing them, which they were willing to share with cosmologists, who explored the very largest scales of space and time. It was also motivated in part by the reaction of some nuclear physicists against the militarization of their work, and represented their commitment to the nobility of physics and rejection of the ignoble purposes to which they felt it had been put.4 Alongside its intellectual and social motivations, the reductionist philosophy fulfilled a timely institutional function in the 1960s. As federal funding for basic research tightened and solid state physics grew, particle physicists faced the prospect of dividing a smaller pot of federal funds with competing fields at a time when they had committed to pursuing the frontier of higher collision energies, which demanded ever-larger and ever moreexpensive accelerators. Reductionism claimed both the mantle of basic science and the pot of federal funds dedicated to it. Not all solid state physicists were content to be typecast as seekers after something other than fundamental insight. Responses to rising reductionism among high energy physicists shows how, after establishing technically oriented work as a legitimate province of American physics, solid state physicists then sought to claim for their field a piece of the intellectual legacy of physics as well. Broadly speaking, reductionism elicited two types of responses. The first denied the very premise that physical knowledge could be deemed “fundamental” strictly on the basis of its intrinsic intellectual merits, without first considering its relationship to other realms of knowledge. The second

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accepted the premise that knowledge could be intrinsically fundamental but denied the further premise that fundamental knowledge could only be had at extreme scales. The first of these views was championed by Alvin Weinberg, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Although not a solid state physicist himself, Weinberg, as the director of a large, broadly invested national laboratory, was sensitive to the possibility that reductionism, should it become a default assumption of the physics community, could adversely affect research on mesoscale phenomena and he felt responsible for speaking on its behalf. The second view is most strongly associated with Philip W. Anderson, the Bell Laboratories solid state theorist whose 1972 Science article “More Is Different” advanced a philosophical position that would come to be known as emergentism. Weinberg’s and Anderson’s views reveal two rhetorical strategies, aside from the reductionism of high energy physics, that American physicists used to navigate the funding bottleneck of the 1960s and 1970s. Weinberg’s view echoed efforts solid state physicists had pioneered to reinvent the core identity of physics in a way that made it more responsive to immediate social demands. Anderson’s instead represented an attempt to bind solid state more tightly to the traditional intellectual core of the physics community. CRITERIA FOR SCIENTIFIC CHOICE

Alvin Weinberg earned his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago in the 1930s—a heady decade for the school. He entered in 1931, the year Chicago’s young, strong-willed president Robert Maynard Hutchins instituted radical reforms to undergraduate education. Weinberg was among the cohort to inaugurate Chicago’s broad-based, two-year liberal arts core known as the “New Plan,” which consisted of a common curriculum of yearlong courses in English composition, humanities, and physical, biological, and social sciences, capped by comprehensive exams at the end of two years.5 He would credit his comprehensive undergraduate education with conditioning him to understand science in terms of how it intertwined with human affairs.6 Weinberg’s sensitivity to the symbiosis between science and society motivated his essay “Criteria for Scientific Choice.” Published in Minerva in 1963 and reprinted in Physics Today in March of the following year, the article argued provocatively that high energy physics, as a field of knowledge comparatively removed both from other areas of science and from quotidian human concerns, was less than deserving of the priority it was receiving in the federal science budget.7 When he published “Criteria for Scientific Choice,”

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Weinberg was the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a post he had assumed in 1955. He had risen through the ranks at Oak Ridge after alighting there following his services to the Manhattan Project at Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory. That so prominent a figure would question the merits of supporting expensive accelerator research rankled in the particle physics community and forced more careful and pointed articulations of its reductionist philosophy. “Criteria for Scientific Choice” warned of tough choices ahead as funding for scientific research plateaued. As the director of Oak Ridge, Weinberg would be charged with deciding which projects to pursue and which to sideline when funding tightened. Anticipating this challenge, he proposed criteria for determining which research could claim priority in funding battles, articulating what would become known as the Weinberg criterion: “The word ‘fundamental’ in basic science, which is often used as a synonym for ‘important,’ can be partly paraphrased into ‘relevance to neighboring areas of science.’ I would therefore sharpen the criterion of scientific merit by proposing that, other things being equal, that field has the most scientific merit which contributes most heavily to and illuminates most brightly its neighboring scientific disciplines.”8 Conceptual fecundity was only one element of Weinberg’s fundamentality calculus. His view included not only conceptual content but also technological fruitfulness and social relevance as components of fundamentality. Tested against these criteria, Weinberg rated particle physics as poor, writing, “I know of few discoveries in ultra-high-energy physics which bear strongly on the rest of science.”9 Weinberg pushed this agenda vigorously at the 1964 meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Washington, DC. “Science which commands great public support must be justified on grounds that originate outside the particular branch of science demanding the support; it must rate high in social, technological, or scientific merit, preferably in all three,” he argued, and challenged particle physicists “to state their case clearly, to say exactly why it is that elementary-particle physics is as important as all our elementaryparticle physicists believe it is. To say that it is ‘fundamental’ in itself does not answer the question, because one then has to decide what one means by ‘fundamental.’ I tried to interpret the idea ‘fundamental’ in basic science to mean having the greatest kind of bearing on the rest of science, and even on other human knowledge.”10 Such a stance holds clear utility for the director of a large, broadly invested laboratory such as Oak Ridge. Weinberg valued research programs that would promote useful connections with other enter-

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prises within the laboratory or shore up the laboratory’s social and political support. Weinberg did not challenge the intrinsic intellectual merit of high energy physics research—which even among its sharpest critics in the physics community was never questioned—but pointed out that “if one justifies a branch of science as a means of expanding man’s cultural horizon, then one gets into the question of other competing ways of expanding man’s cultural horizon, like for example, an expansion of the arts and of literature and music.”11 The argument high energy physicists advanced that the knowledge high energy physics seeks is uniquely fundamental and so should be pursued for its intrinsic cultural merits raised the question of why it was deserving of funds out of proportion with expenditures for other activities of intrinsic cultural value but little direct practical relevance. An approach that focused on the interconnectedness of knowledge set Weinberg in direct opposition to the emerging orthodoxy within particle physics. Victor Weisskopf, an MIT particle theorist, took issue, and the two aired their disagreement in a coauthored Physics Today article entitled “Two Open Letters,” published in June 1964. The exchange did little to forge a common understanding, but it did record a clear exposition of each perspective. Weisskopf argued that “the nucleon is the basis for all matter and therefore of all science,” whereas Weinberg retorted that he was nonetheless, “justified in characterizing high-energy physics as ‘rather remote.’”12 Weisskopf emphasized the possibility in principle of reducing higher-level laws to lower, but Weinberg focused on the impracticality of doing physics from the bottom up. Weisskopf claimed that theories of lower levels were privileged because higher-level theories could be reduced to them; Weinberg allowed any field that met his fecundity criterion to claim fundamental status. It did not matter for Weinberg, when choosing which research to fund, whether or not higher-level phenomena could, in principle, be explained in terms of lower-level phenomena after the fact because, contra Weisskopf, he tested the degree of fundamentality research exhibited by its relationship to other areas of knowledge rather than by its purported relationship to physical reality. These differences account for why Weisskopf and Weinberg talked past each other: they disagreed at the core about how fundamentality was derived. The exchange with Weinberg prompted Weisskopf to develop his thinking further, and he again responded to “Criteria for Scientific Choice” in his own Physics Today missive in 1967. He identified two camps in the physics community; “intensivists,” he claimed, sought first principles above all else,

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Figure 7.1. Victor Weisskopf ’s diagram of intensive and extensive research areas. Reproduced from Victor Weisskopf, “Nuclear Structure and Modern Research,” Physics Today 20, no. 5 (1967), 23–26, with the permission of the American Institute of Physics

whereas “extensivists” ferreted out applications of those principles, either to technology or to other scientific fields (figure 7.1).13 The intensivist position, as Weisskopf described it, aptly characterized the reductionist worldview that particle physicists adopted in the 1960s.14 He cited Weinberg as a paradigm extensivist, and his description of extensive research captured one aspect of the type of fundamentality Weinberg championed—the intersections between bodies of knowledge—with the caveat that Weisskopf excluded the search for such connections from the fundamental realm. The competing views of fundamental science and scientific choice that Weinberg and Weisskopf advanced are best understood as products of a shifting professional landscape in the 1960s. The choices Weinberg had in mind when he advanced his eponymous criterion were choices created by a tightening funding climate, in which hard decisions had to be made about which projects to prioritize. Weisskopf, in turn, was pushed to articulate an assumption that was widespread in the high energy physics community, but which was rarely systematically defended, because he encountered pushback in the form of an alternative view of how to navigate the new funding landscape. Similar concerns would motivate the best-known response to high-energy reductionism, issued by Philip Anderson.

Figure 7.2. Philip W. Anderson, ca. 1962. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Reproduced with permission

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MORE IS DIFFERENT

Philip W. Anderson (figure 7.2), a solid state theorist, was perturbed both by the financial difficulties basic solid state physics faced and by what he perceived as the field’s unjustly low intellectual status. Anderson had completed his PhD at Harvard University in 1949. He immediately joined the solid state group at Bell Laboratories where he imbibed the spirit of the Bell system, in which he could pursue his interests almost unencumbered.15 As a student of John Van Vleck, who had fought against the incursion of technical interests into solid state physics, Anderson was likely predisposed to see the field in terms of its potential to make fundamental conceptual contributions. The environment at Bell at the time is nevertheless relevant to appreciating his standpoint. Bell was still buzzing from the invention of the transistor two years earlier, which promised to revolutionize the telecommunications industry. This and other high-profile successes attracted a slew of talented young physicists, and Anderson found himself among a uniquely large and accomplished assemblage of solid state theorists and experimentalists. Stefan Machlup, a postdoc who overlapped with Anderson, wrote to William Shockley, the codirector of the Bell solid state division, to recount his impressions and recalled, “I think everybody on my hall was doing exactly what he wanted to do,” and expressed awe at the concentration of expertise, observing that although “it’s not as ‘gemütlich’ as a college campus . . . [i]f you’ve got an obscure technical problem, chances are that somewhere in the two-mile network of corridors sits the expert on this particular specialty.”16 That concentration of expertise, combined with the tremendous success of the transistor, gave Bell outsized influence over the development of solid state physics through the postwar years.17 From 1945 to 1970—when the Physical Review split into four sections—Bell Labs physicists were authors or coauthors of 1,824 papers in the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. This made it far and away the leading industrial laboratory by this metric. Over the same span, General Electric researchers placed 622 papers in these two journals, Westinghouse 458, and IBM 367. But this output also placed Bell among the most prolific of any contributors to the country’s most prestigious journals, outpacing the large and well-funded physics departments and research institutes of the University of Chicago (1,504), the University of Illinois (1,475), Columbia University (1,149), Stanford University (1,010), Harvard University (992), Cornell University (976), the University of Penn-

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sylvania (948), and Princeton University (942). Bell’s output surpassed each of the National Laboratories and among universities was bested only by the University of California, Berkeley (2,649) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1,864), both of which it would have exceeded if not for contributions from Berkeley’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (1,741) and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories (316).18 The translation of Bell researchers’ labors into papers as well as patents reflects a working environment more akin to a large university department than to most other industrial laboratories of the age. Bell hosted, for instance, a university-style seminar series that attracted the leading solid state physicists of the day and promoted a culture of intellectual exchange. In Anderson’s assessment: “Industry in general was still the big room of eight desks in Westinghouse and everybody trying to figure out how the transistor works, and nobody doing his own research. Or it was GE where there were a few people doing their own research, but they weren’t really the high quality of Bell Labs. . . . IBM was to become an imitator. Various things were to become imitators. But Bell Labs was unique. With the attitude at least at this point that you had a lot of freedom.”19 Through the 1950s and 1960s, benefiting from Bell’s vibrant intellectual climate and considerable investigative freedom, Anderson conducted the research that would earn him the Nobel Prize he shared with Van Vleck and the British physicist Nevill Mott in 1977, “for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems.”20 By the late 1960s, however, even denizens of the Bell oasis could detect twinges of the concern abroad in the solid state community. In the spring of 1967, Anderson delivered a lecture at the University of California, San Diego, that formed the seed of his 1972 Science article, “More Is Different.” The talk grew, as Anderson later recalled, from the simmering discontent he perceived within the solid state community.21 In Anderson’s view, solid state was accorded somewhat less than its due. Nuclear and particle physicists were more highly sought-after in influential government advisory roles, many prominent universities hired solid state faculty only as an afterthought, and solid state physicists had trouble breaking into prestigious institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS member rolls validate Anderson’s concern. Between Charles Kittel in 1957 and both Anderson and Charles Slichter in 1967, the academy admitted six solid state physicists compared with twenty-seven nuclear and particle physicists.22 Anderson’s entry into the dispute over the nature of fundamental physical

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knowledge did not, as might seem natural for a solid state physicist, mirror Weinberg’s argument that fundamental research is that which exhibits broad relevance. Instead, he rejected the narrow characterization of intensive research that Weisskopf (who had served on Anderson’s doctoral examining committee) had advanced. Anderson, however, accepted a key presumption that Weinberg had rejected: he agreed with Weisskopf and other proponents of reductionism that fundamentality was innate to some types of scientific knowledge. He disagreed with them only about the realms in which it could be found. Despite differences with his ostensible allies, he did attempt to ground their primary conclusion—that reductionist physics should not be funded to the detriment of other fields—on a sound philosophical basis. In doing so he focused the debate around a single disagreement about the nature of scientific knowledge. “More Is Different” begins: “The reductionist hypothesis may still be a topic for controversy among philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted without question.”23 Some biologists, chemists, psychologists, or even other solid state physicists might have resisted this characterization, but the statement did reflect prevailing trends in the physics community. In 1970, particle physics research received approximately four government dollars for every one spent on basic solid state research.24 This was despite the fact that the American Physical Society’s Division of Solid State Physics remained the largest division and was over twice as large as the Division of Particles and Fields.25 The reductionist worldview—even if it was not, as Anderson claimed, naively accepted within the scientific community broadly—had succeeded in shaping the way the federal government funded physics. Anderson opposed the reasoning, which he attributed to particle physicists, “that if everything obeys the same fundamental laws, then the only scientists who are studying anything really fundamental are those who are working on those laws.”26 This view, according to Anderson, started from the hypothesis that laws and concepts operating on any given level of complexity could be reduced to laws and concepts at a lower level of complexity. It thereby concluded that only research addressing the ultimate constituents of matter and energy could be truly fundamental. The reductionist argument built into particle physicists’ philosophy of scientific knowledge the justification for pursuing research on progressively smaller scales, using accelerators of progressively higher energy and greater cost. By arguing that the foundational character of smaller physical scales conferred privilege upon knowl-

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edge of the laws governing those scales, reductionism supported the view that science funding should reflect the hierarchy that particle physicists saw in the physical world. In his efforts to undermine this position, Anderson avoided the Weinberg criterion and its emphasis on conceptual, technological, and social applicability. He accepted the standard reductionist premise that laws governing higher-level phenomena could be reduced to laws governing lower-level phenomena, but rejected the inverse, claiming that the particle physicists’ view of fundamentality rested on a constructionist hypothesis, which assumed that higher-level laws could be extrapolated from lower-level laws. With this move, Anderson attacked the narrow definition of intensive research that underwrote the reductionist scientific hierarchy, preserving the ability of solid state physicists to claim fundamental insight, contending: “The main fallacy of this kind of thinking is that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a ‘constructionist’ one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.”27 Anderson’s emergence-based view of fundamentality granted the concepts and laws of solid state physics independence by virtue of the fact that they could not realistically be derived from lower-level concepts and laws alone. He illustrated his point with the example of an ammonia molecule, aiming to demonstrate construction’s failure even at the level of simple molecular systems. Naively, ammonia should have a dipole moment, given its asymmetric, pyramidal structure. A nitrogen atom forms polar covalent bonds with three hydrogen atoms, leaving the nitrogen with a net negative and the hydrogen with a net positive charge. The resulting tetrahedron, though, does not empirically behave like a dipole. In its stationary state, the molecule is in a superposition of the left-hand and right-hand orientations; when observed through time it undergoes a process of inversion, in which the nitrogen atom tunnels through the plane defined by the hydrogen atoms and emerges on the other side, several billion times per second, canceling out any dipole effect. A broad swath of physicists would have been familiar with ammonia’s properties; it provided the material basis for the original maser, which Charles Townes and his research group had announced, to considerable acclaim, in 1955.28 Nitrogen inversion itself had been a familiar chemical process for several decades. It received renewed interest in the mid-1950s when nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy allowed it to be measured with accuracy superior to that provided by older radio-frequency techniques.29 Anderson

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leveraged a familiar example to illustrate the implausibility of applying foundational symmetry laws to larger systems without reference to higher-level structure: “I would challenge you to start from the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics and predict the ammonia inversion and its easily observable properties without going through the stage of using the unsymmetrical pyramidal structure, even though no ‘state’ ever has that structure.”30 Construction, in other words, is impracticable: “The relationship between the system and its parts is intellectually a one-way street. Synthesis is expected to be all but impossible; analysis on the other hand, may not only be possible but fruitful in all kinds of ways,” a result he hoped would undercut “the arrogance of the particle physicist” and allow that “each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.”31 Anderson did not draw out this statement’s implications, but it is tempting to see the tacit suggestion that a whole new conceptual structure would require a whole new funding structure. The distinction between impossible in practice and impossible in principle lingers under the surface of Anderson’s analysis. He rejected the restrictive view of intensive research, and yet hedged when saying that the synthesis of lower-level laws to find higher-level laws is “all but impossible” and calling it an “intellectual,” rather than a physical or natural one-way street. He claimed that the laws of solid state physics could never practically be extrapolated from quantum mechanics without reference to empirically established, higher-level phenomena; he fought shy of the stronger claim that higher-level laws could never in principle be derived from below. Anderson does not explain the delicate dance he executes by linking the independence of higher-level concepts to practical rather than physical considerations. I propose four reasons this position is notable. The first two reflect Anderson’s more general focus on the practice of science. The third and fourth draw on other elements of his context and help explain how “More Is Different” fit within it. I do not reject the possibility that Anderson quite straightforwardly considered the argument that new levels were independent in practice to be the better-justified position. Rather than providing an exhaustive account of why Anderson held the view he did, the factors discussed here demonstrate how richly interconnected Anderson’s position was with his professional context. Anderson has himself acknowledged, in retrospect, that his perspectives were shaped by conditions in the scientific community that were unfavorable to solid state physicists: “Sociologists of science posit that there is a personal or emotional subtext behind much scientific work, and that its integrity is therefore necessarily compromised. I agree with the

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first but reject the second. I think ‘More Is Different’ embodies these truths. The article was unquestionably the result of a buildup of resentment and discontent on my part and among the condensed matter physicists I normally spoke with.”32 Considering how the fine structure of Anderson’s argument worked within the context that motivated it therefore builds upon his own understanding of its origins. The first reason Anderson’s focus on practical-level independence is notable is that it reflects his more general focus on scientific practice. Here, he is consistent with Weinberg. Permissive views of fundamentality were uniformly hardheaded about the process of scientific research. The in-principle derivability of higher-level phenomena was academic if it provided no practical directives for doing science. Anderson reprised his argument in 2001: “A perverse reader could postulate a sufficiently brilliant genius—a superEinstein—who might see at least the outlines of the phenomena at the new scale; but the fact is that neither Einstein nor Feynman succeeded in solving superconductivity.”33 Superconductivity was a notoriously intractable theoretical puzzle. Failing to derive a theory of it was almost a rite of passage for the most accomplished theoretical physicists before John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer succeeded in 1957. Felix Bloch advanced the tongue-in-cheek theorem that all theories of superconductivity can be disproved, a refinement of Wolfgang Pauli’s more cutting version of the theorem: theories of superconductivity are wrong. The core insight that led to the successful theory, Cooper’s realization that electrons paired off at very low temperatures, forming “Cooper pairs” that traveled without resistance through superconducting materials, required thinking about the system in terms of the relations among its components, rather than by building up from first principles. Similarly, Anderson’s ammonia example drew its force from the fact that anyone attempting to describe an ammonia molecule’s behavior for the first time would, by any reasonable understanding of practice, be required to employ higher-level concepts in addition to first principles. Second, that necessity supplied a font of new solid state problems. In a 1999 interview with Alexei Kojevnikov, Anderson recalled being motivated to develop his philosophical views in part by a lecture Brian Pippard, a Cambridge solid state theorist, had given at a superconductivity conference hosted by IBM in 1960.34 Pippard lamented a lack of compelling and accessible fundamental problems in solid state, suggesting that solutions to the most prominent—such as superconductivity—had deprived the field of appealing intellectual challenges for young talent. Pippard offered up the gloomy prog-

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nostication that “ten years is going to see the end of our [solid state physicists’] games as pure physicists, though not as technologists,” and advocated “a swing of emphasis now away from pure research to applications,” which should necessitate exposing promising students to “the methods of research in industrial laboratories.”35 Anderson, who spent the 1967–68 academic year as Pippard’s colleague during a visiting professorship at Cambridge, described him as “a professional pessimist.”36 The second axis of Anderson’s argument from practice is evident in his reaction against Pippard’s gloominess about academic solid state research. “More Is Different” makes the case for the widespread availability of academy-friendly, intellectually interesting basic research problems in solid state physics. The practical necessity of employing higher-level concepts to describe solid state systems provided, for Anderson, a nearly inexhaustible supply of new and interesting fundamental questions. The failure of construction ensured that solving long-standing problems did not impoverish the field as much as Pippard supposed; surprising physics could always be expected when considering the next level of complexity. This interpretation meshes well with Anderson’s clear preference for practical considerations, because the question of in-principle independence had little bearing on whether an adequate supply of interesting research problems would be available to slake the intellectual thirst of future graduate students. Third, the narrow focus on practice was expedient. A strong claim about the nature of objective physical reality was not essential to allow solid state research a claim to fundamental knowledge given an argument that denied the practical possibility of synthesis. Because claims to fundamental knowledge and financial support were correlated during this period, at least for particle physicists, Anderson can be read as making the weakest claim necessary to advance his position without inviting attack from those who objected to the wholesale independence of higher levels from lower levels. As long as the case could be made for acquiring knowledge of higher levels, questions of physical hierarchy were merely supposition.37 Fourth and finally, the contours of Anderson’s philosophical position and the consequences it had for fundamentality debates can be understood in terms of changing prestige politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Physics enjoyed considerable prestige following the Second World War, but as the funding plateau Weinberg predicted arrived, prestige, like financial support, became a limited resource, leaving physicists to carve it up among their subdisciplines. Separating reduction and construction severed the link between

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physical hierarchy and intellectual hierarchy. Anderson sought to deny particle physicists an exclusive claim to fundamental knowledge, knowing, as Weinberg did, that “fundamental” often meant the same thing as “important.” The weaker position also avoided the question of whether a permissive view undermined the prestige of physics more generally. Solid state might have been struggling in this period, but physics was still firmly established as the standard bearer for American science. A stronger view implying the equivalence of all scientific knowledge would have been strange given the circumstances.38 Although Anderson gives no indication that this was a conscious motivation, his argument does have the convenient consequence of undermining the exclusive claim that particle physicists laid on fundamental knowledge without similarly undermining the more general entitlement physicists felt to rare levels of social approbation and federal funding. Anderson subsequently expanded his view to encompass concepts in the social and biological as well as the physical sciences, but recalled that his initial sensitivity to the level-dependence of concepts arose because it was “the principle by which my own field of science arose from the underlying laws about particles and interactions; and it was only as I broadened my perspective that I realized how general emergence is.”39 It is therefore appropriate to understand Anderson’s 1972 stance as primarily about physics, even though he later refined it into a view about science in general. It is also worth noting that by the time Anderson’s emergentism had fully matured, biology had unseated physics as the doyen of the American sciences. Examining these contextual pressures brings Anderson’s departure from the Weinberg criterion into focus. Their differences correspond to a shift in conditions within the scientific community. The funding pinch in the late 1960s and early 1970s was asymmetrical. Particle physics, the flagship enterprise of reductionism, enjoyed continued success in the form of new, expensive facilities. Anderson recognized the growing prestige and funding gaps between solid state and particle physics. Amid these conditions, which became more acute as large government grants became more difficult to obtain, Anderson developed a view of fundamentality that departed sharply from fecundity arguments, although it arrived at similar conclusions. Given the undistinguished, impecunious position Anderson perceived solid state physics to occupy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the well-worn claim that research needed only to provide a basis for further research to be fundamental would not have met the challenge that particle physics posed. Instead, Anderson sought the source of fundamentality in the nature of physical knowledge,

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adopting the strategy that had served particle physicists so well. “More Is Different” makes the best historical sense when placed against the foil of particle physics and its strong reductionism and set within a context where physics still dominated American science. The notion that fundamentality measured breadth of fruitfulness implied no hierarchy and did not play favorites among the sciences. Anderson, by accepting the innate view of fundamentality more typical of the reductionist account, denied particle physics an exclusive claim to the privilege physical knowledge enjoyed, as a matter of course, over chemical, biological, or social scientific knowledge. THE POWER OF PROFESSIONAL PRESTIGE

Both the rise of reductionism in the high energy physics community and responses from other physicists suggest that changing financial realities and corresponding hierarchical shifts within the scientific community in the 1960s exerted pressure on physicists to develop the presumptions that otherwise tacitly governed their practice into more fully realized philosophical positions. Weinberg’s criteria for scientific choice presumed, correctly, that the post–Second World War funding honeymoon would wane and that some lines of intellectually promising research would have to be prioritized over others. And to whatever extent Anderson’s views on fundamentality might have been based in his research, he was moved to refine and articulate them by professional challenges. Those challenges, from the late 1960s on, were frequently parsed in terms of professional prestige. Anderson’s worry that solid state physics was overwhelmingly associated with technical applications was born out by media depictions of the field in the years after “More Is Different” appeared. The New York Times coverage of the Nobel Prize he shared with John Van Vleck and Nevill Mott in 1977 announced that “the three winners, all theoreticians in solid-state physics, were cited for work underlying the development of computer memories, office copying machines and many other devices of modern electronics.”40 In 1973, the lede to the article reporting Leo Esaki, Ivar Glaever, and Brian Josephson’s prize for fundamental work in superconductors and semiconductors read, “The three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics made discoveries regarding phenomena unfamiliar to the layman, yet vital to his television set or the computers that affect many aspects of his life.”41 Particle physics awards received somewhat different coverage in this era. Three years later, the Times science reporter Malcolm W. Browne, after describing a chemistry prize relevant to the pharmaceutical industry, shifted

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to the physics prize, awarded to Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam, writing: “While such practical applications have no part in the work of the physics prize recipients, many scientists regard their work as fundamental to understanding nature.”42 The persistent portrayal of solid state work as subservient to technical aims remained a sore point for Anderson and his peers. Developing a robust philosophical case for the field’s intellectual viability was one part of their response. But it would not be sufficient. Addressing the tension between the technical dimensions of solid state physics and its aspirations to intellectual prestige would require a more thorough reimagining of its identity.

8 BECOMING CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS

Adding a chapter so named to the conventionally labeled group of mechanics, heat, acoustics, and so forth is, of course, a little like trying to divide people into women, men, girls, boys, and zither players. —DWIGHT GRAY, 1963

The second edition of the American Institute of Physics Handbook, a comprehensive reference volume, appeared in 1963. The revised edition included a new section devoted to solid state physics.1 Its editor, Dwight Gray, announcing the handbook’s release in Physics Today, delivered the quip in the epigraph above and recounted his coeditor’s droll suggestion “that perhaps the book should contain only three major sections—Solid-State Physics, Liquid-State Physics, and Gaseous-State Physics.” The editors resolved, however, that “the advantages of consolidating solid state material into one chapter outweighed the disadvantages of a somewhat untidy classification system.”2 Through the 1960s, solid state physicists showed similar pragmatism regarding their field’s untidiness. Perhaps solid state was a problematic category, but it was expedient; it created elbow room for applied physicists to pursue technical research without threatening their identity as physicists. But beginning in the late 1960s, that expediency began to wear thin. Industrial and applied physics were by that time well-established members of the American physics community. The professional concerns du jour among solid state physicists centered instead on intellectual standing—the type of concerns to which Philip Anderson was responding when he wrote “More Is Different” in 1972. Efforts to reform solid state physics so as to empha-

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size its intellectual vibrancy lent impetus to a new name, “condensed matter physics,” which gradually gained popularity in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. Although condensed matter physics would encompass many of the topic areas that constituted solid state physics, its aims were substantively different. Robert Proctor notes in his study of common suffixes that “the names given to particular science fields and subfields are shaped, to a certain extent, by ideological baggage picked up in the course of usage.”3 Far from being innocuous, the name change reflected the ideological baggage of “solid state physics.” It was the culmination of long-standing tensions within the solid state community between the pro-industry agenda that motivated Roman Smoluchowski and a desire for a conceptually coherent definition of the discipline’s purpose and scope, which emphasized its contributions to fundamental physical understanding. The shift toward condensed matter and away from solid state language comes into clearest focus through the lens of the federal advisory apparatus. In the mid-1940s, when solid state physics emerged, the factors the physics community examined when defining its categories were based predominantly on internal professional concerns. Because physicists did not come to regard centralized federal support as the norm until post–Second World War patterns had stabilized, solid state physics, as incubated in the American Physical Society (APS) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, took shape in response to the internal professional concerns of the physics community rather than responding directly to federal funding incentives. By the 1970s, the enormous increase in government funding had changed how new disciplinary categories were constructed. As the case of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and materials science shows, top-down federal incentives were potent forces determining how physicists arranged their activities, and how they talked about them. The term “condensed matter physics” originated in the physics community, but its status as a disciplinary category was fixed by its enshrinement as a funding category before this change was reflected in the APS, which, by this time, had an extensive and entrenched divisional structure that was more difficult to change than it had been in the 1940s. Three National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reports, published in 1966, 1972, and 1986, chart the rise of condensed matter physics. Examining these against both the ideological background set out in the preceding chapters and the institutional and conceptual evolution of the field that occurred between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s illustrates how condensed matter physics emerged as an alternative to solid state and exposes the qualitative differences

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between the two categories. Historians and physicists alike commonly treat “solid state physics” and “condensed matter physics” as effective equivalents, distinguished only because they were preferred in different eras. Anderson, a member of the first generation of American physicists trained in solid state theory and an early adopter of the “condensed matter” label, assumes continuity when referring to “solid state (now ‘condensed matter’) physics.”4 Similarly, Helge Kragh writes: “From a sociological and historical point of view, solid state physics did not exist [in the 1930s]. It was only after World War II that the new science of the solid bodies, later to be called condensed-matter physics, took off.”5 These claims are not without merit. The shift from solid state to condensed matter physics was marked by substantial continuity of physical problems and practices; however, topical and methodological continuity do not translate unproblematically into disciplinary continuity. This straightforward equivalence between solid state and condensed matter is sometimes complicated by appealing to condensed matter’s broader topical scope. Walter Kohn’s historical treatment of solid state physics suggests that it “was enlarged to include the study of the physical properties of liquids and given the name ‘condensed matter physics.’”6 Volker Heine points to polymer research as the catalyst for renaming the Cavendish Laboratory’s solid state theory group “Theory of Condensed Matter.”7 Spencer Weart takes these partial observations further by suggesting that condensed matter resolved difficulties intrinsic to solid state: “The newly popular name included liquids and, like ‘materials science’ in a different manner, reflected a persistent uncertainty as to whether ‘solid-state physics’ was the best way to group subfields.”8 Weart’s insight points toward a richer story about the name change, which was more than either a simple rebranding or the rectification of a long-standing error. Condensed matter did respond to nagging skepticism about solid state, but the parallel growth of materials science indicates that addressing these concerns was neither simple nor straightforward. Condensed matter physics represented a resurgence of a form of the pure science ideal within the solid state community. But it was not Rowland’s pure science ideal. Condensed matter physicists, as denizens of the late Cold War, championed physical knowledge as being simultaneously fundamental and relevant to technical development. It was an audacious ambition. High energy physics had sustained its intellectual status largely by disdaining technical connections. Burton Richter’s response to a question about his work’s possible application after being awarded the Nobel Prize, with Samuel Ting,

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for the discovery of the J/Ψ meson—“The significance is that we have learned something more about the structure of the universe. In terms of practical application right now, it’s got none”—was a typical attitude.9 The close link between solid state work and workaday technologies was so tight that it often obscured conceptual accomplishments. Condensed matter physics took on the challenge of reasserting the intellectual contributions of physical work on complex matter while also gambling that its proximity to questions of technical interest would preserve its most stable funding streams. THE ORIGINS OF CONDENSED MATTER

Condensed matter, like solid state, was a technical term before becoming a disciplinary category. When physical questions did not depend on a specific state of matter, as long as it was dense enough, physicists talked about “condensed matter” as a medium through which, for example, a muon might travel and exhibit noteworthy behavior.10 Early uses of this type were scattered, and almost exclusively by particle physicists. As a designator of a discernible field of inquiry, the term appeared first in Europe and only slowly percolated to the United States.11 The German journal Zeitschrift für Physik reorganized in 1962, titling its Section B “Condensed Matter.” The Physical Review followed suit, to a limited extent, a year later, announcing in October 1963 that in the following year: “The first twelve issues of each volume will be divided into two sections (A and B) of six issues each, appearing alternately. Section A will be primarily devoted to the physics of atoms, molecules, and condensed matter, and Section B will be primarily devoted to the physics of nuclei and elementary particles.”12 But such early topical uses fell short of becoming disciplinary designators in the United States. In the Physical Review, early uses of “condensed matter” to indicate a field of study invariably referenced Zeitschrift articles or conferences devoted to condensed matter held in Europe, where the term held more currency.13 A more significant development was the launch of the journal Physik der kondensierten Materie, founded in West Germany in 1962, published by Springer-Verlag and edited by the Swiss physicist Georg Busch.14 The journal was published simultaneously as Physique de la matière condensée and Physics of Condensed Matter, and accepted articles in German, French, or English. The boilerplate description added in the second issue described its scope as “relating mainly to thermal, electrical, magnetic and optical properties of solids and liquids in the broadest sense.” It explained the decision to

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cast its net beyond solids: “Inclusion of work in the physics of both solid and the liquid phase is intended to increase closer contact between both areas and especially to further research in the area of liquids.”15 Physics of Condensed Matter sought a broader remit than solid state physics, which in Europe tended to remain restricted to solids with regular lattice structures. The German term festkörperphysik was little known before the mid-1950s, when the first few professorships in the physics of solids were awarded in Germany.16 The earliest evident published use is in the title of a proceedings volume of a conference held in Dresden, May 9–11, 1952.17 It reached a more general audience in Die Naturwissenschaften in 1954 as the title of a review article that synthesized mostly American and German sources.18 Its author, Heinz Pick, alluded to the term’s recent provenance: “In the catalogue of major fields of modern physical research, one meets increasingly often with the concept solid state physics.”19 He also made observations similar to those of his American counterparts about the category’s conceptual consistency, remarking: “One is inclined to take such a word to designate a clearly defined, unified field. On closer inspection, this hope turns out at first to be entirely unconfirmed.”20 The way out of this dilemma, for Pick, was to restrict the topical range of the field. He concluded that festkörperphysik was conceptually consistent by virtue of revolving around the lattice structure of crystalline solids, ignoring noncrystalline solids, superfluidity, the magnetic susceptibility of gases, and other topics with little or nothing to do with lattice structure that fell within the American solid state synthesis. By excluding them, Pick was able to sweep troubling inconsistencies aside, even if it meant defining the field more narrowly. France was slower than Germany in adopting its own analogue of solid state, but, as in the German case, the category’s amorphous nature allowed it to bend to local priorities. Pierre Teissier has attributed the inelasticity of French institutions after the war to the persistence of heavy-handed “feudal regimes” that guided French research through the late 1950s. It took a new generation of researchers, trained after the war, to dislodge this entrenched system. When “physique du solide” (or, occasionally, physique de l’état solide) appeared in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so did the equally potent chimie du solide, which harnessed a long French tradition in chemistry.21 Teissier’s assessment is borne out by patterns of usage in French journals. The first evident use of “physique du solide” in Le Journal du Physique et la Radium was by Jacque Friedel in 1955, who, in an article on ferromagnetism, referred to atomic and molecular orbitals as “the two fundamental approxi-

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mations of solid state physics and chemistry.”22 The term would not recur in the country’s flagship physics journal until 1959 and 1960, when it began to appear in the names of French institutions, such as the Service de Physique du Solide et de Résonance Magnétique in Saclay and the Laboratoire de Magnétisme et de Physique du Solide in Bellevue. That Friedel would be an early adopter of solid state nomenclature is unsurprising considering he took his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1952, studying under Nevill Mott.23 By 1952 Mott, who identified his work as solid state physics, was the director of a lively research group on physics of solids at Bristol’s H. H. Willis Physical Laboratory.24 British physicists were more apt than French or German physicists to publish in American journals or attend conferences in the United States and the absence of a language barrier permitted comparatively easy acceptance of the term in Britain.25 Lawrence Bragg lectured at the Royal Institution on “The Physics of the Solid State” in March 1949.26 Although British institutions, like their French counterparts, were steeped in tradition and loath to adopt new names, the establishment of the International Journal of the Physics and Chemistry of Solids by Oxford-based Pergamon Press in 1956 gave the moniker a stronghold on the British Isles. Solid state physics, as a category, had a weaker hold on the European continent than it did in the Anglo-American world, in large part because its US incarnation owed so much to the peculiar features of the relationship between American universities and American industry. As a result, the terminology of condensed matter physics, taken up rapidly in Europe, was slow to catch on in the United States, even as research emphases shifted in similar directions on both continents. The Physical Review’s partial fission in October 1963, with one section “devoted to the physics of atoms, molecules, and condensed matter,”27 was the only clear occurrence of “condensed matter physics” in APS journals throughout the 1960s; discussions of reorganization in the APS Executive Committee uniformly call section A the solid state section.28 Condensed matter physics language, in other words, was rare and marginal in the 1960s, an assessment borne out by a contemporary overview of the field from the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences. THE PAKE REPORT

In 1962, Frederick Seitz was elected president of the National Academy of Sciences. One of his first major initiatives was to commission a series of reports on the current status of the scientific fields in the academy’s purview, to be undertaken by the NRC. The committee surveying physics included

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established solid state physicists Charles Townes, Harvey Brooks, and Roman Smoluchowski, along with David Pines, who had recently earned his stripes exploring the implications of the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer theory of superconductivity. The Pake report (named for its chairman, George Pake) was published in 1966 and identified “Solid-State (and Condensed-Matter) Physics” as one of the primary divisions whose progress it addressed.29 The solid state and condensed matter subcommittee inserted a footnote into a draft of the report in April 1964 explaining the naming decision, pointing out that around 90 percent of the field consisted of work on solids, thus using “solid state” as a general term was good enough for government work.30 “Condensed matter” in the Pake report was both literally and figuratively parenthetical. Despite the passing acknowledgment that it might be a more appropriate term, the compilers referenced condensed matter only when the phenomenon under discussion deviated too uncomfortably from the realm of solids. They described early research in the field, for example, by slipping seamlessly from talking about solids to invoking condensed matter when discussing superfluidity: “Until the beginning of this century . . . the science of solids remained almost entirely empirical and descriptive. Between 1912 and the early 1930s, most of the salient properties of condensed matter, with the striking exception of superfluidity, were understood at least qualitatively.” Such results ensured, the report continued, slipping back into the language of solids, that “[t]he stage was set for the beginning of solid-state physics in its present sense.”31 “Condensed matter” papered over spots in the Pake report where the restrictive nature of “solid state” became too obvious for comfort. As of the mid-1960s, the term did not presage sweeping changes to the structure and identity of solid state physics. Though the report insisted that solid state “is a fundamental branch of physics” and suggested that future progress in solid state “could well turn out to be of greater significance to our knowledge of the world than further progress in elementary-particle physics,” it saved the greatest emphasis for solid state’s technical contributions.32 The section entitled “Intellectual Challenge” began: “In solid-state physics there is at present no clearly visible need for radically new concepts” and made the case for conceptual importance by pointing to inchoate research areas, such as noncrystalline solids, as the potential but unproven source of “new concepts and principals.”33 The report reflected the pessimism at large in the 1960s regarding solid state’s potential to make foundational intellectual contributions. Brian Pippard’s recommendation that solid state physi-

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cists turn away from curiosity-driven research and start training students for careers in industry, which had so rankled Philip Anderson, was symptomatic of the sense at the time that solid state had pushed about as far as it could into the conceptual frontier.34 Fields such as plasma physics, which had secured its place with an APS division of its own in 1959, benefited as physicists interested in complex matter looked beyond solid state for greener intellectual pastures.35 In a similar, if less defeatist spirit, the Pake report, although tepid about solid state’s basic research potential, raved about its “indispensable [role] in numerous technological developments,” boasting that “the whole [of ] communications technology is being fundamentally affected by these [solid state] developments.”36 The authors, shifting from their cautious tone when discussing solid state’s intellectual importance, emphasized the “indispensable,” “vital,” and “essential” contributions solid state research made to technological systems that were “totally dependent” on solid state devices and knowhow.37 Solid state was still building its intellectual portfolio, but its technological track record was strong. As long as the field justified itself primarily on technological grounds, its most prominent research programs would be focused around solids; nagging concerns about solid state’s appropriateness as a category could be swept under the rug, as they had been in the 1962 AIP Handbook. THE BROMLEY REPORT

In the early 1970s—as dismay over the widening prestige gap between solid state and particle physics peaked—“condensed matter” began to replace “solid state” as the preferred term in advisory circles. The NRC report published in 1972 included a chapter on “Physics of Condensed Matter.”38 It eschewed the language of solid state when referencing the contemporary field, though it retained solid state terminology for historical observations. In all, the two terms appear with about equal frequency. The 1972 committee contained many of the same members as the 1966 group—notably Brooks, Townes, and Smoluchowski—but some new recruits wrote the chapter on condensed matter physics. Among them was Morrel Cohen, a University of Chicago physicist who was one of two Americans who had served on the editorial board of Physik der kondensierten Materie since its founding and who had begun describing his research specialty as “physics of condensed matter” no later than 1964.39 The shift in language was accompanied by newly potent concerns over

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funding patterns. The condensed matter chapter explained: “Our objective is to show that basic research in physics of condensed matter, performed solely to understand in the deepest possible way the complex behavior of solids and liquids, has been the source of two decades of unprecedented achievement in critical new technologies. We see no way in which these achievements could have been planned in the past and no way in which further progress can be programmed except by continued support of basic research.”40 Programming—the planning and funding of research programs based on preconceived technological goals—was an ever-present bugbear for solid state and condensed matter physicists concerned for their intellectual prestige. The formulation of research programs with specific practical outcomes in mind, the modus operandi in materials science, threatened to undermine their intellectual autonomy and motivated the condensed matter panel to state the field’s intellectual value much more vociferously than their counterparts had in 1966. The 1972 panel was accordingly circumspect about solid state’s technological contributions. They asserted that solid state research had been responsible for steady innovation, but were careful to emphasize “the richness and complexity of these events [inventions of solid state technologies], as well as the varied motivations of the scientists and engineers involved.”41 By emphasizing the complexity and capriciousness of the routes from basic research to technological applications, the panel sought to protect federal funding for basic solid state research by undermining the federal government’s tendency to link basic research expenditure to clearly articulated outcomes: “The United States would not spend its research and development dollars nearly so well if it insisted either that basic research be strongly motivated by and directed to practical goals or that all basic research be isolated from practical considerations.”42 The shift toward condensed matter coincided with rising concern about an environment that married research support to practical outcomes—the “coupling” that had so chagrined Benjamin Lax. The same forces to which the 1972 NRC report reacted prompted Philip Anderson to defend the intellectual merit of complex-systems physics in “More Is Different” that same year. “More Is Different” introduced another wrinkle to the name question, referring to “many-body physics.” The term calls to mind the quantum many-body problem, the notorious intractability of calculating a wave function for quantum systems containing three or more interacting bodies. The impossibility of deducing the properties of many-body systems from first principles meant, for Anderson, that the con-

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cepts employed to understand complex systems were just as intellectually valuable as those used to understand elementary particles.43 Although it continued to describe research confronting the quantum many-body problem, “many-body physics” never threatened to supplant “solid state physics” as a designator of the larger community, in part, no doubt, because of its narrow focus on theory. Anderson’s usage of the term, however, mirrors the way condensed matter began to be used in the same era, sometimes by Anderson himself.44 Both terms refocused attention on methodological commonalities and thus fit more conveniently into the narrative around intellectual prestige and research funding that condensed matter physicists preferred. That “condensed matter” was a professionally motivated category in the 1970s is evident when examining its published usage. Between 1970 and 1979, only 32 articles in APS journals contained “condensed matter” in their titles or abstracts. In comparison, 121 included “solid state,” 1,019 contained “solids,” and “high energy” appeared 1,399 times.45 The move toward condensed matter language in the NRC, then, was not a reflection of prevailing research practices or self-identification patterns. “Solid state” and “condensed matter” were both capacious umbrella categories that did little to shape day-to-day research. They had greater meaning as professional groupings and funding designations. The terminological shift reflected a change of professional ideology brought about as solid state physicists confronted challenges to their intellectual prestige and funding for exploratory research. The watershed moment for condensed matter came with a proposal at the January 1978 council meeting to rename the Division of Solid State Physics (DSSP) the “Division of Condensed Matter Physics.” The suggestion scandalized representatives from the Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD), who perceived an invasion of their turf: “[François] Frenkiel expressed concern over the overlap between the subject matter covered by a Division of Condensed Matter Physics and by the Division of Fluid Dynamics, and noted that approval of such a change would force the Division of Fluid Dynamics to change its name. [Tony] Maxworthy noted that the Division of Fluid Dynamics Executive Committee expressed strong feeling against the name change.”46 The matter was postponed until April, giving the two divisions some time to hash out their differences. The motion succeeded at the April meeting, but it remained controversial, passing by a vote of fifteen in favor to seven opposed at a time when unanimity was the norm for council votes.47 The DSSP had been identified with solids for so long that the new name stepped on the toes of other divisions. The Division of Fluid Dynamics did

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not need to change its name, but its members’ resistance shows that the shift from solid state to condensed matter included significant reorientation of solid state’s professional goals at a time when research on fluids was gaining ground. As research on liquid helium, for example—one of the more colorful feathers in the solid state cap, with its exotic properties like superfluidity— became a more active area of research, the language of solids became correspondingly more inconvenient and the observation from the Pake report that solids accounted for upward of 90 percent of the activity in the field no longer applied.48 The DFD understandably saw the DSSP’s efforts to bring fluids under its aegis as imperialistic. The condensed matter partisans within the DSSP, for their part, pursued a new conceptual focus that inconvenienced the existing institutional structure that had grown in the days when solid state maintained a more thoroughly industrial reputation. The DFD had been founded in 1948, shortly after the DSSP. The renaming in the late 1970s signaled a newfound commitment to advocating for condensed matter as a basic research enterprise and, in so doing, threatened the organizations that had filled that void in the years when solid state physics was a more thoroughly industrial pursuit. Solid state physics had always had a strong industrial patina. In the National Research Council’s 1946 survey of US industrial laboratories, just before the DSSP’s founding, only Bell Laboratories counted “solid state physics” among its research specialties.49 By the 1960 edition of the same survey, the term was not limited to the likes of Bell, which maintained a large basic research staff. The American Machine and Foundry Company in Stamford, Connecticut, Hughes Aircraft Company’s Newport Beach lab, and Control Data Corporation in Minneapolis were among the dozens of laboratories that counted solid state among their specialties, including many that listed no physicists among their researchers.50 Solid state’s applied bent was well understood by its practitioners, even those who preferred to nudge it away from industry. Research for the Pake report concluded that in 1963 60 percent of funding for solid state was spent in industry.51 The success of ARPA’s interdisciplinary laboratories (IDLs) in the universities, though widely celebrated, generated concerns about the relationship between solid state and physics as a whole. Harvey Brooks worried in a 1964 letter to Walter Kohn that the growth of IDLs and applied physics departments had exacerbated an existing tendency for solid state to isolate itself. He was most concerned for solid state theorists, who, when colocated with materials researchers, lost connections to other theoretical physicists,

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hampering their ability to participate in the verbal exchanges that he identified as being critical to theory.52 By the early 1970s, condensed matter physics had begun to seem like an alternative that could address these concerns. THE BRINKMAN REPORT

The years between the 1972 Bromley report and the next major survey, in 1986, witnessed systemic changes in the solid state and condensed matter community. In the mid-1970s, the US Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against AT&T, which led to a 1982 consent decree under which the company relinquished control of its local telephone networks.53 The breakup of the Bell System was completed in 1984. The turmoil within the company in advance of the breakup spread to Bell Labs, whose scientists began an exodus, scattering what had been a powerful, centralized cadre of semiconductor physicists across many university departments and other research labs.54 The industrial focus at Bell Labs had kept one of the country’s most influential solid state physics groups focused on solids. Its researchers enjoyed the same types of freedoms academic researchers enjoyed, but Bell was predisposed to hire physicists whose basic interests aligned closely with areas of potential application to telecommunications—new research areas of interest to condensed matter physicists, such as quantum fluids, held little interest for Bell. The exodus from what had been the most powerful center of solid state physics therefore eased the transition to a broader conception of the field. A nationwide shift away from solid state and toward condensed matter that culminated with the breakup of the Bell group was also enacted through changes in a number of major institutions and programs. The Aspen Center for Physics, a prominent summer retreat for theoretical physicists begun in 1962, integrated condensed matter physics into its program in the late 1970s, under the influence of Philip Anderson.55 In 1979, the University of California, Santa Barbara founded its Institute for Theoretical Physics with Walter Kohn as the founding director. Kohn was a pioneer of density functional theory (DFT), which models the electron structure of molecules and materials using functions of electron density.56 The research program Kohn developed using DFT emphasized its widest possible application to all phases of condensed matter—one measure of its success in this regard is that the Physical Review article introducing the theory is one of the most highly cited physics papers to date.57 The Santa Fe Institute, founded in 1984 and framing its intellectual mission under the guidance of condensed matter physicist David Pines, took the science of complexity as its mission.58

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These changes came about in large part because of theoretical developments. The quantum mechanical techniques of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s worked well for regular solids but were frustrated by other condensed matter systems. DFT, with its remarkable generality, was a harbinger of further theoretical advances in the 1970s. The British/Israeli physicist Cyril Domb remembered the early 1970s as the moment when the study of critical phenomena—such as phase transitions—gained theoretical respectability through the application of renormalization group theory.59 It solidified its professional respectability through conferences such as the Battelle Colloquium, which met in Geneva and Gstaad, Switzerland, in September 1970 to explore the relevance of critical phenomena to the science of materials.60 The Battelle Colloquium included Leo Kadanoff, then at Brown University, who in 1978 was hired by the University of Chicago to join its James Franck Institute (JFI). The JFI offers a representative example of the institutional transitions occurring within solid state and condensed matter physics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It had been founded after the Second World War as the Institute for the Study of Metals (ISM), one of three research institutes conceived to carry on the conceptual work of the Manhattan Project research the university had hosted, albeit with an emphasis on basic, nonmilitary research. Its early mission, “to pursue studies in the fundamental properties of matter as related to metals,” reflected the state of solid state physics, incipient though it was, in the late 1940s, and resembled something Roman Smoluchowski, who initially sought an APS division for metals physicists that would encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration, might have envisaged.61 Originally directed by the metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith, the ISM took its cue from the study of the properties of uranium and plutonium that the wartime Metallurgical Laboratory had conducted, minus the military emphasis, and pursued the interdisciplinary study of metals. By the time Smith resigned as director in 1957, that initial mission had translated into a roughly equal balance between solid state physics and physical chemistry. The ISM’s research division employed nine physicists, eight physical chemists, and two metallurgists, whose most lively research areas included crystallography, magnetism, elastic and inelastic properties of metals, and low-temperature research, including superconductivity.62 It was, in other words, firmly within the mainstream of 1950s solid state research. Its emphasis on metals implied a research program on crystalline solids, and the interdisciplinary constitution of the institution ensured that the physics conducted there proceeded in close collaboration with chemistry and metallurgy.

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The ISM changed its name in 1967 to commemorate emeritus professor of chemistry, and 1925 physics Nobel laureate, James Franck, who had died in 1964. But another purpose reflected an inkling that the institute’s historical focus on metals would soon prove limiting. An internal memo explained: “One of the purposes for the change in name is to avoid a possible inhibiting factor in promoting a new direction in the research to be carried on in this facility. At the present time this research is generally limited to the areas of chemical physics and solid state physics. It is believed to be desirable to expand the activities in these areas by developing research programs in the area of chemical biology. The name of the Institute of Metals may tend to be an inhibiting factor in promoting this development.”63 One of the motives for considering a new emphasis on chemical biology was the 1964 dissolution of the ISM’s sibling institute, the Institute for Radiobiology and Biophysics, which prompted ISM researchers to think about moving into territory it had once occupied.64 But the promised expansion into chemical biology was not forthcoming. The JFI’s first few years under its new moniker were marked by the same stringent budgetary environment that had led to the dissolution of the biophysics institute. Several retirements weakened its standing in solid state physics and shifted its emphasis toward chemistry. When the physical chemist Ole Kleppa took over as director, he placed an emphasis on recovering the institute’s lost capacity in physics, “to achieve a somewhat closer numerical balance between the physical and chemistry components of our faculty.”65 The sense that the institute would need to expand its topical scope nonetheless proved prescient. By the late 1970s, when the institute sought to expand its faculty, it took advantage of its new name’s flexibility to emphasize recent theoretical developments in condensed matter physics. The addition of Kadanoff in 1978 and Albert Libchaber in 1982 shifted the emphasis of the JFI away from physical metallurgy and toward the study of critical phenomena and nonlinear dynamics, fields in which it subsequently established itself as a major national center. The JFI’s trajectory illustrates the wider national context within which condensed matter language won favor among those who sought to distance the field from industry and reconnect with the pure science tradition that remained a strong ideological force in American physics. The 1986 NRC report on condensed matter physics—dubbed the Brinkman report after committee chairman William F. Brinkman of Sandia National Laboratories— addressed the problem of intellectual prestige by highlighting “the fact that

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condensed matter physics is the physics of systems with an enormous number of degrees of freedom.” As a consequence, the report maintained, echoing the substance of Anderson’s 1972 arguments, “[a] high degree of creativity is required to find conceptually, mathematically, and experimentally tractable ways of extracting the essential features of such systems, where exact treatment is an impossible task.” The Brinkman report went to great lengths to identify condensed matter physics as a fundamental and intellectually valuable field of science, and thereby to distinguish it from materials science. “Condensed-matter physics is intellectually stimulating,” the report emphasized, “because of the discoveries of fundamental new phenomena and states of matter, the development of new concepts, and the opening up of new subfields that have occurred continuously throughout its sixty-year history.”66 The choice of a sixty-year timeline for the field is telling of the authors’ agenda, especially since the Pake report committee thought Max von Laue’s discovery of X-ray diffraction in 1912 a more appropriate landmark.67 Harkening back to 1926, the year in which quantum mechanics displaced the old quantum theory, placed condensed matter firmly in the tradition of the quantum theory of solids, which emerged in the late 1920s as some of the architects of quantum mechanics explored the new theory’s utility for describing electrons in metals and the importance of such applications for understanding the foundations of the new theory.68 Precisely dating condensed matter to the advent of quantum mechanics made it clear that condensed matter physics was defined, at core, by its intellectual contributions to physics and that it was united around the methods required to describe the complex interactions of atoms and molecules in close proximity. Solid state physicists before the 1980s preferred earlier touchstones, mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Slater, for instance, launched an overview of the field in 1952, writing: “The physics of the solid state is nothing new. In 1900 it was as well realized as now that mechanics, heat, electricity, magnetism, optics, all have their solidstate aspects.”69 Following such a strategy for condensed matter physics would have made it more difficult to distinguish it from materials science. Making that separation evident emphasized that condensed matter physicists would not carry water for technological interests. The report began by declaring, “We are not surveying materials science nor the considerable impact of condensed-matter physics on technology.”70 By the mid-1980s, the distinctions between condensed matter—the “fundamental” discipline—and materials science—its applied cousin—were solidifying, while the fragile pro-

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fessional alliance that had sustained solid state physics through the preceding decades loosened. Though distancing themselves from industrial associations, condensed matter physicists notably did not seek a clean break with solid state physics, choosing instead to emphasize the conceptual and methodological continuities between the fields, a move made easier by the widespread impression that solid state had been poorly named. Solid state’s technological accomplishments—such as the transistor, superconducting magnets, and magnetic resonance imaging—remained integral to condensed matter’s rhetorical arsenal. Despite its protestations that it was not surveying the technological dimension of condensed matter physics, the Brinkman report touted condensed matter as “the field of physics that has the greatest impact on our daily lives through the technological developments to which it gives rise.” It was not, however, within the job description of condensed matter physicists to pursue those developments. It might be “a field whose health is essential for maintaining the vital flow of new technology,” but realizing those technologies was to be left to other disciplines.71 The implied division of labor kept condensed matter physicists one degree removed from actual technological applications, which fell to materials scientists and engineers. This perspective presupposed something akin to the linear model of innovation, namely the philosophy, unpopular with materials scientists, that unfettered and unscripted basic research was the primary wellspring of technological advance.72 Rustum Roy, cofounder of the Materials Research Society, called the notion that basic science begets innovation, which in turn begets prosperity, “preposterous, certainly in league with perpetual motion.”73 For condensed matter physicists, though, it promised to realize their hopes of carving out a greater proportion of the federal budget for fundamental research, especially when combined with reminders that condensed matter physics was behind some of the most prominent technical accomplishments of the preceding decades. Condensed matter physicists, even in detailed surveys such as the 1986 NRC report, limited themselves to showing that basic scientific knowledge was broadly relevant to existing areas of technological importance. They did not spell out how funding for basic research would translate into technological advances on the ground—and so in this sense they were not articulating a strict version of the linear model.74 Most likely they held no deep commitment to any particular vision of how scientific knowledge was connected to technological development. Their real commitment was to the overall value

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of basic research; rhetoric establishing some connection to technology was a tool suited to that goal, and if the connection was vague, all the better. The growth of materials science into the development arm of the old solid state constellation allowed condensed matter physicists the latitude to bracket the question of how the raw knowledge mined by physicists would be refined into usable technology as somebody else’s problem. Drawing too close an association between basic research and applied goals tempted explicit links between basic research funding and applied targets, the very specter condensed matter physicists hoped to avoid. They therefore walked a fine line, pressing hard for intellectual prestige while still hoping to maintain a plausible claim to technological relevance. The demanding problems presented by the physical complexity of solids were by no means unique to that phase of matter. The methods and concepts developed to investigate and understand solids transitioned fluidly into the broader category of condensed matter with the rise of new research areas. As they did, the professional objectives to which they were turned changed markedly. Solids were originally chosen as a disciplinary category because of their shared relevance to industrial and academic physicists. In the 1940s, that choice served the perceived need to bring industrial researchers into the professional fold and to establish better lines of communication beyond the academy. By the 1970s, condensed matter served the opposite impulse. Solid state’s industrial past was a liability in the eyes of those who defended the merit of its intellectual content, even if its technological accomplishments were a rhetorical necessity. The category of condensed matter physics, by returning to shared practices as a way of defining the field, aided physicists interested in the basic problems posed by complex material systems in their efforts to emphasize the intellectually challenging elements of their enterprise, but without also abrogating their claim to technological fertility. Through the postwar decades, solid state physics could treat work on nonsolids as relevant, but marginal. By the mid-1980s, quantum fluids, critical phenomena, nonlinear dynamics, complexity studies, and similar research areas that could not be easily lumped in with solids were the most intellectually exciting areas, at a time when emphasizing conceptual contributions became one of the field’s most pressing goals. When these areas blossomed in the early 1970s, they put the lie to the pessimistic outlook for solid state physics that Brian Pippard had articulated in 1961.75 But their new prominence also strained the conceptual consistency of solid state physics, already a point of concern, beyond credulity. Reframing much of what had been called solid

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state physics as condensed matter physics brought these practices to the center and emphasized the field’s claim on the intellectual status of American physics, while also seeking to retain the reputation for technological fecundity that solid state physics enjoyed.

9 MOBILIZING AGAINST MEGASCIENCE

Because it is so diverse and dispersed, small science has lacked the single voice with which big science has been able to speak, thus permitting a number of myths to persist: such as the myth of trickle-down technology; the myth of the single intellectual frontier; and the myth of the non-zerosum gain. These imply that supporting big science is a good economic investment that can be done without hurting small science. —PAUL A. FLEURY, 1991

In 1982, the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields held the first of what would become regular meetings in Snowmass, Colorado, to plan their field’s future. The lofty elevation and rarified atmosphere of the Rocky Mountains suited their ambitions. Attendees confronted the question of where, when, and how to build the next-generation particle accelerator. The massive machine they envisioned would have been the largest physical laboratory ever constructed, and the most expensive. The reductionist ideal that had driven high energy physics since the 1960s guided its conception and mission. Almost a century after Henry Rowland articulated his pure science vision, the high energy physics community was poised to push it to its logical extremes with a taxpayer-funded effort to probe basic questions about the structure of the universe, with scant concession to technological or economic considerations. The accelerator imagined at Snowmass would require so much cheap, flat, and sparsely populated space that it would by necessity be a “machinein-the-desert,” as Leon Lederman—who would win the Nobel Prize in 1988 for his neutrino research—put it.1 Following Lederman’s lead, Snowmass participants began calling this imagined machine “the Desertron.”2 News outlets seized on the flashy name for what would eventually become the illstarred Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC. Time, The Economist, New

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Scientist, and others reported breathlessly after Snowmass 1982 on how the Desertron, a multibillion-dollar particle physics dream machine, would reshape our understanding of the universe.3 The mammoth accelerator, with a beam pipe 54.1 miles in circumference, would eventually be sited in Waxahachie, Texas, south of Dallas-Fort Worth. From the standpoint of 1980s particle physics, an accelerator surpassing the energies available at Fermilab’s Tevatron was necessary to provide experimental grounding for the final pieces of the standard model of particle physics and to explore its limits. The target energy for the SSC was 20 TeV, below which particle physicists were certain the Higgs boson, one of the last pieces of the standard model that awaited experimental discovery, would be found. Steven Weinberg justified the 20 TeV target to Congress with an analogy to Christopher Columbus: “It is a little bit like Columbus sailing west from Spain. Columbus promised that he would get to the Indies if he could sail far enough West. Well, that was wrong, but what he should have said, which would have been correct, is that if he sailed far enough West, he would get to the Indies unless something equally interesting got in the way.”4 The 20 TeV target guaranteed finding the Higgs, unless the machine first found physics that broke the standard model and forced a radical reimagining of the field. High energy physicists hoped for the Higgs, and found the possibility that the journey to 20 TeV would be interrupted by undiscovered continents even more tantalizing. But where Weinberg saw Columbus, others saw Burke and Wills, the Australian explorers who succeeded in crossing the continent from south to north, but found little nourishment in the empty desert between the coasts and died trying to complete the return journey.5 Some conceptions of the standard model suggested that, although the journey to 20 TeV would surely reveal the Higgs, little else of interest was likely to appear along the way, and that the Desertron could therefore be expected to map out a vast, empty conceptual desert. Stumbling upon an unadorned Higgs as an oasis amid a wasteland came to be known as the “nightmare scenario” for particle physics, and it appears to be playing out now at the Large Hadron Collider, where a Higgs boson consistent with the standard model was uncovered in 2012.6 Uncertainty about the potential of a 20 TeV accelerator to do more than find the Higgs (and perhaps the top quark, which would be detected in 1995 at the Tevatron) opened the door to other objections, most notably from condensed matter physicists who complained that the Desertron promised a funding desert for physicists pursuing fundamental research in

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anything other than elementary particle physics. The objections of physicists who worried about a big-science monopoly on federal spending for basic research contributed to Congress yanking the SSC’s funding, even after construction on the Waxahachie site was well under way, in 1993. Unlike the earlier internecine squabbles that had shaped post–Second World War prestige hierarchies and funding dynamics, which tended to remain largely within the physics community, these debates played out in public, where arguments about the SSC contested much more than the merits of a single facility. The SSC debates, as seen through the congressional record, popular books, and op-ed columns, constituted a referendum on the future of American physics. The referendum was high stakes. The success of a multibillion-dollar accelerator, conceived at unprecedented scale, would have reaffirmed the status of high energy physics as the marquee American science in the face of over a decade of challenges to its privilege. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), whose closed-door decision-making process favored the whims of influential individuals, was dissolved in 1974. As Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne Kolb document in Tunnel Visions, their definitive history of the SSC, the Department of Energy, which took the AEC’s place and approved funds through the regular congressional appropriations processes, began a slow erosion of the influence high energy physicists held over the federal funding of science.7 The 1970s also saw the birth of recombinant DNA techniques and the 1980s launched with the passage of the Bayh–Dole Act, which permitted universities and other organizations to file for patents on intellectual property deriving from federally funded research. In conjunction, these developments encouraged the commercialization of academic molecular biology and set the groundwork for biomedicine to expand both its public profile and its funding portfolio. Biology began to claw its way up the institutional hierarchies of American universities with the purchase offered by the promise of patent revenues.8 The SSC’s failure affirmed these trends, whereas its success might have forestalled them. The factors that led to the SSC’s demise included lack of international collaborators, internal mismanagement, cost overruns that placed the final estimated price tag at over $11 billion, and the end of the Cold War, with the incentive it had provided to outcompete the Soviet Union in all things. This case study does not offer a full accounting of these factors, but instead examines the SSC from the perspective of solid state and condensed matter physics.9 What did the SSC mean for condensed matter physics and what did condensed matter physics mean for the SSC? Condensed matter physi-

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cists tended to oppose the project, and they did so with greater intensity, frequency, and volume through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Congressional budget hawks, whose numbers increased after the 1992 elections, considered the SSC profligate and found value in such testimony. High energy physicists bristled. They felt blindsided by their colleagues’ attacks on a project they viewed as necessary to advance fundamental knowledge, and to ensure federal support of basic research of any kind. Vocal, public opposition to so high-profile a project from within physics was irregular. Dissent, in the unspoken rules of the physics community, stayed in the family. Mobilizing that dissent in order to influence those holding the federal purse strings would be perceived as a betrayal. Solid state physicists, like Benjamin Lax, might have harbored reservations about the merits of Fermilab when it was taking shape in the late 1960s, but they were cautious about voicing them in public. Even at the peak of his frustrations about tepid federal support of the National Magnet Laboratory, Lax avoided venting them in the direction of any particular project, at least in writing. Alvin Weinberg, although his criteria for scientific choice were unfavorable to high energy physics, also kept his critiques on the general level and did not seek to undermine any specific funding request. So when Senator John O. Pastore asked Robert Wilson in a congressional hearing about appropriations for the National Accelerator Laboratory, “Would you say as far as you know, the whole scientific community is behind this, without a dissent?” Wilson could reply, “They do not dissent to me, sir.”10 The SSC would not enjoy the same deference. Resistance from condensed matter physicists and materials scientists who considered the SSC an extravagant toy for the amusement of a small slice of physicists was prevalent and public. That opposition signaled the boiling over of tensions that had strained the American physics community for half a century. Despite the influence of the Cold War security state, the rapid expansion of solid state and condensed matter physics, and the increasing presence of physicists in industry, the pure science ideal lived on in high energy physics, where it combined with a strong reductionist philosophy. By the time of the SSC hearings, however, condensed matter physics had synthesized a clear alternative: an embrace of basic condensed matter research as a more probable foundation for future technological benefits than other research as well as a good in itself. This competing ideal proved better adapted to the context of the early 1990s. After the demise of the SSC delivered a blow to the reductionist spin on the pure science ideal that had sustained high energy physics for decades, the con-

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densed matter physicists’ view of physics remained as the vision that physicists would have to adopt to continue federal support for their field. The following is organized around the three myths Paul A. Fleury, a physicist then at Bell Laboratories, identified in his congressional testimony opposing the SSC: the myth of trickle-down technology, the myth of the single intellectual frontier, and the myth of the non-zero-sum gain.11 These capture the threefold objection that solid state physicists posed to the SSC and to the rhetoric in its favor: first, that high energy physicists were claiming spin-off technologies for the SSC that should more rightly be credited to condensed matter physics; second, that high energy physics was not the only route to fundamental knowledge; and third, that a single, multibilliondollar laboratory serving a small minority of physicists was not the best way to ensure future advances of either technology or fundamental knowledge. These objections derived from the alternative vision of physics and its place in American society that solid state physicists had developed by the time of the SSC debates. Analyzing these objections as they were deployed in the emotionally charged battle over the SSC’s fate brings into focus the central ideological disagreement that defined American physics at the end of the twentieth century and demonstrates how solid state physics, in its first half century as a part of American physics, shifted the field’s center. THE MYTH OF TRICKLE-DOWN TECHNOLOGY

Spin-off claims were part of the standard rationale for the SSC. Although high energy physicists had long invoked incidental technological developments as a fringe benefit of their research, those justifications were firmly subordinate. High energy physicists, when they suggested that spin-offs should be factored into the value of fundamental science, traditionally took pains to emphasize that they could not predict or guarantee specific spin-off technologies.12 “To extrapolate from the recondite topics of current fundamental scientific investigation to a technological spin-off is to indulge in grandiose speculation. Responsible colleagues shirk the task almost as a tradition,” Leon Lederman wrote in a 1984 Scientific American article presenting his arguments for supporting fundamental research to a popular audience.13 But spin-off claims would assume a new and outsized importance during the push to get the SSC built. By the late 1980s, the Cold War, nearing its end, no longer warranted the hitherto potent assumption that all physics was potentially defense-relevant, and certainly being pursued by the Soviet Union. Economic competitiveness

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had taken the place of national defense as the standard by which federal expenditures on science would be measured.14 Economic and technological spin-off claims grew into a new role as an answer to this challenge. The exacting demands of accelerator design and construction, SSC boosters argued, would advance existing technologies, uncover novel applications, and generate new job-making industries. Specific promises—which some of Lederman’s colleagues were willing to make despite his insistence on their fruitlessness—included better magnet and superconducting technologies such as those that powered MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines, advances in computing, and even improved tunneling techniques that could be applied to the construction of subway systems. Such benefits could, the argument went, be expected to offset the up-front cost of the project in the long term. But spin-offs, high energy physicists cautioned, were often unanticipated; unforeseen benefits should factor into the equation as well. The site selection competition that ran from early 1987 to late 1988 did a considerable amount to make spin-off claims more prominent. Michigan representative Milton Robert (Bob) Carr put the point succinctly in a March 1988 House Appropriations Committee hearing. “That’s not the way the Governors are looking at it,” he responded to Secretary of Energy John Harrington’s insistence that the SSC was a basic research project first and foremost, “they’re looking at the jobs and the economic development and the spinoffs.”15 Coaxing support for siting proposals from state governments required articulating clear and concrete benefits to the region, and these arguments percolated into the overall rational for building the SSC. Through this process, spin-offs were asked to carry a justificatory role they could not sustain, opening a line of attack for condensed matter physicists who bridled at the suggestion that their own field’s technical contributions were mere fallout from the accelerator explosion. Legislators’ reactions to spin-off claims reveal some of their pitfalls. In a March 5, 1986, subcommittee hearing on the Department of Energy (DOE) budget, the chairman, Florida Democrat Don Fuqua, asked Alvin Trivelpiece, director of the DOE’s Office of Energy Research: “There appears to be some confusion between the Department’s High Energy Physics Program and the Strategic Defense Initiative. We had a witness yesterday that said high energy physics was mostly SDI. Can you kind of clarify the relationship between those two programs?” The assertion that the DOE’s high energy physics program was bound up in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—better known by the sarcastic epithet “Star Wars,” the missile defense program that by the

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end of the 1980s would become a paradigm boondoggle—wrong-footed Trivelpiece, who replied: “I have no idea what the other witness may have had in mind. It’s difficult to imagine putting Fermilab into orbit, but perhaps we could give a try. Sometimes some of the individuals there seem to be in orbit, but you can hear more about that from Leon [Lederman].”16 The statement to which Fuqua referred had come from Charles J. Mankin, the state geologist of Oklahoma, who on March 4 mistakenly conflated the portions of the DOE budget dedicated to high energy physics and SDI in his plea for more federal funding for fossil fuel research.17 But Trivelpiece himself might have contributed to Fuqua’s associating SDI with the SSC. In his own testimony leading up to Fuqua’s question, he had said: “The current collection of activities that are in the Strategic Defense Initiative to some extent owe their existence to the basic research that has been done in highenergy physics, nuclear physics, and the fusion program, and basic energy sciences in other parts of the Department. So there is a lot of contemporary technology transfer.”18 Fuqua’s misunderstanding illustrates two important pitfalls of spin-off claims. First, legislators often failed to distinguish between different types of expertise when evaluating expert testimony, which made it difficult for high energy physicists to place spin-offs in the context they desired. Mankin, a geologist, could not be expected to offer expertise on high energy physics spending, but through the grind of long committee hearings, his testimony was admixed with those of other witnesses and the precise nature of his expertise lost relevance. Second, the more central spin-offs became, the more some legislators began to understand the principle purpose of the SSC to be the generation of new applications, weakening the intellectual justification for the project. Many high energy physicists were therefore ambivalent about spin-off claims, and became more so in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the political heat ratcheted up and it became difficult to sustain the idea that an increasingly expensive SSC was a better bet than direct investment in the technological arenas it would purportedly advance. They recognized spin-offs as useful if presented as a bonus Congress could expect for free if it supported the public good of fundamental research, but the more central the notion of spin-offs became to the overall justification for the SSC, the less the project seemed worth the price tag. Congress would have to be convinced to pay for the goods; they were unlikely to shell out for the lagniappe. Spin-off claims nonetheless proved hard to contain. Legislators often pushed for specific benefits to their home states or to the nation. Pointing to

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a track record of technological and medical advances linked, however weakly, to high energy physics, whetted legislators’ appetite for pork. Many SSC advocates, including SSC director Roy Schwitters, perceived that high-minded declarations of the ennobling nature of fundamental knowledge would not suffice to convince legislators that the project was worthwhile. “Elementary particle physics does not exist in isolation,” Schwitters asserted in his written statement for a 1989 Senate subcommittee meeting on the DOE budget: “Stimulation, information, and techniques flow both ways: from other activities toward particle physics, and from particle physics toward other activities.”19 He emphasized intellectual overlap with nuclear physics, cosmology, and condensed matter physics, and stressed that the demands of accelerator engineering had technological ramifications for computing, superconducting magnets, and semiconductor devices. The cutting-edge technical needs of accelerators, Schwitters maintained, “provide fruitful interchange with other researchers, manufacturers, and developers of technology in fields such as medical imagery.”20 Cosmologist George Smoot, testifying in a 1992 Senate hearing, recounted an anecdote about sharing a plane with a group of cataract patients traveling for laser surgery only available in the United States, which he used to illustrate the claim: “It just shows you do not know what development is going to turn out to be something useful. . . . You really have to understand the basics of all science. That is where physics, and particularly higher energy physics comes together because physics is what we call the queen of sciences. It is the basic underlying structure for all of sciences, the foundation everything sits on. You have to understand physics to understand what is going on.”21 Such treatment was available, he implied, and available in the United States, at least in part because of robust support for basic research in the form of high energy physics. But tying the supposed generative power of high energy physics to its status as the science of the fundamental scale proved contentious, even among SSC advocates. Smoot, for example, testified immediately after Lederman, who dissociated the reductionist justification from spin-off claims: “[Technological benefits] would be a crazy reason to build the SSC. We do not build it for the spin-offs. We build it because we are humans who think and are insatiably curious, and have an unquenchable determination to know,” recalling Robert Wilson’s apology for the National Accelerator Laboratory twenty-five years earlier.22 Lederman’s argument contrasts the willingness of his younger colleagues to adopt spin-off arguments when convenient. The

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split might well have been generational. Schwitters and Smoot were both born in the mid-1940s and earned their doctorates in the early 1970s. In contrast, Lederman, born in 1922, along with another advocate for the unembellished reductionist justification, Steven Weinberg, born in 1933, were among the generation who had overseen the articulation of the philosophy in the 1960s. For them, stooping to arguments on the basis of technological output weakened the justification for pursuing fundamental physics for its own sake. The high stakes of the SSC debates influenced these two groups differently. On one hand, it promoted an intensification of the reductionism that had underwritten particle physics’ push to higher energies through the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, suspicions that such a justification would not work on its own prompted younger physicists to advance spin-off claims, which Lederman, Weinberg, and other members of the old guard found distracting and at times counterproductive. The persistence of spin-off claims, especially those related to superconductors, semiconductors, nuclear magnetic resonance, and other elements of the solid state domain, stoked the fires of opposition among condensed matter physicists. The very spin-offs that high energy physicists were claiming for accelerator development, they insisted, were actually the result of research in solid state physics, which nevertheless faced limited resources for basic research that were likely to become leaner in the shadow of the SSC. This variety of resistance made an impression on legislators, who responded by pushing back on spin-off claims and asking high energy physicists to articulate specific targeted outcomes, which was anathema to the goals of the project. Some of the most damning testimony came from Nicolaas Bloembergen, a Harvard-based condensed matter physicist and 1991 president of the American Physical Society. Bloembergen had won a share of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on laser spectroscopy and had also contributed to the early work on nuclear magnetic resonance that led to MRI techniques.23 The MRI was probably the most-cited spin-off adduced in favor of high energy physics research during the SSC hearings. It connected the otherwise remote phenomenon of superconductivity, which was, after all, part of the project’s name, to a well-known medical technology of obvious humanitarian benefit. But Bloembergen assured the Senate: “As one of the pioneers in the field of magnetic resonance, I can assure you that these [MRI and superconducting magnets] are spinoffs of small-scale science, and not of the SSC.”24 He also worked behind the scenes to try to tamp down such claims. In a sharp letter to Fermilab’s Richard A. Carrigan Jr., Bloembergen chastised SSC support-

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ers for telling Congress that MRI was a spin-off of high energy physics. Such a claim, he wrote, was both “unwarranted and ill-advised. It completely ignores the essential contributions by a very large number of physicists who have brought MRI to fruition. MRI would be alive and well today if Fermilab had never existed.”25 The letter found its way into the congressional record juxtaposed with a ferocious missive by Michigan Democrat Howard Wolpe and New York Republican Sherwood Boehlert, both members of the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, castigating the Department of Energy for misleading Congress about the SSC’s cost and timeline.26 Bloembergen was not the only APS president to throw the clout of his office behind his objections to the SSC. In March 1991, Cornell’s James Krumhansl published a piece in Physics Today based on his outgoing presidential address at the 1990 APS meeting in Washington, in which he made veiled references—legible to his audience as references to the SSC—to the danger of hyperbole and failure to assign appropriate credit when evangelizing for one’s field.27 The speech itself came only two months before Krumhansl wrote to journalist Malcolm Browne, who himself had published an editorial in the New York Times raising doubts “as to whether the new knowledge it [the SSC] generates will be commensurate with the enormous cost.”28 Krumhansl’s letter charged that “extravagant representation to the public of the potential fruits from the SSC was fictitious and ethically irresponsible and that accurate acknowledgement was not given to researchers in many other subfields of physics which were the true source of contributions from physics to medicine, technology, economics and education but imputed to particle physics.”29 Materials Research Society cofounder Rustum Roy, for his part, invoked Alvin Weinberg’s criteria for scientific choice in 1993 to insist: “Nothing the speculative science the SSC can discover can ever have any impact on chemistry, biology, engineering science, materials, agriculture.”30 As the SSC’s budget ballooned in the last years of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, skepticism about spin-off claims grew in popular forums as well. Historian of science Alexi Assmus wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “In fact, the SSC uses old technology: the name ‘superconducting’ in SSC refers to helium-cooled superconducting magnets that have been used for more than 30 years, not to the new high-temperature superconductors that have recently been discovered by condensed matter physicists.”31 A widely syndicated column by Los Angeles Times contributor and technology consultant Michael Schrage skewered spin-offs in August 1992, writing that the rosy vision of regional and national economic revitalization that often ac-

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Figure 9.1. The Supercompliant Superprovider, 1993. John Trever cartoon depicting the disconnect between high energy physicists’ expectations and federal priorities. Credit: Copyright 1993 by John Trever, Albuquerque Journal. Reprinted by permission

companied panegyrics for the SSC “has not a neutrino of truth to support it.” Pork, not technological progress, was the real spin-off in Scharge’s eyes.32 Spin-off claims became more and more associated with the “quark-barrel politics” that the New Republic had derided during the site-selection process, and that contributed to the schadenfreude that accompanied the project’s cancellation (figure 9.1).33 The collapse of the spin-off narrative became a convenient cudgel with which skeptical legislators could hammer the project. Representative Virginia Smith, a Nebraska Republican, asked James F. Decker, acting director of the Office for Energy Research, in March 1988: “I note that your budget justification, Dr. Decker, says ‘The SSC will have discoveries, innovations and spinoffs that will profoundly touch every American.’ I come from the second most agricultural district in the Nation. Could you tell me just how the SSC will profoundly touch every farmer in Western Nebraska?”34 Boehlert, the most colorful of the SSC’s congressional opponents, was more pointed in May 1993: “None of them [spin-off claims for the SSC] are a result of what is going on with the SSC project, not one single one, and the SSC is not going

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to feed the hungry people of Somalia, and it is not going to end the genocide in Yugoslavia. It is just eating up more of our resources.”35 The offense condensed matter physicists expressed about spin-off claims that trespassed on their turf both galvanized their opposition to the project and connected effectively with legislators. Both are evident in Paul Fleury’s identification of spin-off claims as “the myth of trickle-down technology.” The term carried a specific ideological resonance in the early 1990s. It invited comparisons between the funding structure of high energy physics and “trickle-down economics,” a pejorative commonly hurled at the supply-side fiscal policies of the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. The analogy implied that the interests of high energy physicists were just as remote from the needs of technology, economy, and other areas of science as the interests of large corporations and the wealthy magnates who ran them were from the needs of the middle-income Americans to whom politicians reliably pandered. Painting the SSC as remote was integral to the case against it, and it extended also into condensed matter physicists’ objections to the knowledge claims that high energy physicists made on behalf of the machine. THE MYTH OF THE SINGLE INTELLECTUAL FRONTIER

Although divided about the merits and efficacy of spin-off claims, high energy physicists—and cosmologists, who were their close allies throughout the hearings—were uniformly of the opinion that the SSC was valuable because it could offer fundamental knowledge where other facilities, and other branches of physics, could not. They maintained the belief, summarized by Silvan  S.  Schweber, that “elementary particle physics has a privileged position, in that the ontology of its domain and the order manifested by that domain refer to the building blocks of the higher levels.”36 Most practicing physicists who testified on the project’s behalf recognized the limitations of spin-off claims, and the consequent need to push as hard as possible on the intellectual necessity of the SSC. Reductionism, already the unifying philosophical thrust of high energy physics, would be hammered to an even sharper point in the forge of Congress, prompting condensed matter physicists to deploy their emergentist philosophy in response. High energy physicists presented the strong reductionism that was required to create a sense of urgency around the SSC to Congress wrapped with a sense of the antiquity of the reductionist enterprise and tied with a bow of reverent rhetoric about the importance of discovering the universe’s

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most deeply hidden secrets. Leon Lederman commonly employed the strategy of casting the SSC as the culmination of a narrative beginning in Ancient Greece: “The road from Miletis [sic] to the SSC is what philosophers call a reductionist road. . . . Until we can complete the unification process and make the picture mathematically whole, the question of how the world works will not be answered.”37 Presenting the SSC as the apotheosis of a twomillennium-old quest added to the sense that it contributed to some constitutional human desire for meaning. Burton Richter promised that, should the SSC succeed, “You’d know everything there was to know about our physical world, and you would know much better what man’s place is in that physical world. And that is spiritual, intellectual, what-have-you, that kind of knowledge and satisfaction.”38 But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the priestly mien high energy physicists had adopted successfully for much of the Cold War was losing its potency. Humor writer Dave Barry, in his syndicated column in November 1987, skewered the SSC’s cost overruns alongside the remote nature of the physics it would pursue and the high-minded justifications physicists gave for it. He suggested that the “giant underground racetrack for invisible particles” was conceived only after “a 400-foot-long nuclear-powered undersea saxophone” was deemed “too practical.” “Needless to say,” Barry wrote, “the Superconducting Super Collider concept was conceived by research scientists, who are driven, as always, by a burning desire to push back the frontiers of obtaining federal funds.”39 In defiance of such backlash, those high energy physicists who fought shy of spin-off claims pushed to make the intellectual case for the SSC as strong as possible, which meant embracing a strong form of reductionism. Steven Weinberg provided the most consistent and impassioned defense of the strong reductionist position. The 1979 Nobel Prize had recognized his work unifying electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, and he was a visible public advocate for reductionist science, writing a popular book that expressed optimism for the culmination of physics with a unified physical theory.40 Throughout the hearings, his broader view of science and specific justifications for building the SSC worked in lockstep. The case he offered August 1993 aptly summarizes his position and is notable for the direct contrast presented by Philip W. Anderson, who testified immediately after him. “We are at the frontier,” Weinberg testified, “we have pushed the chain of questions why as far as we can, and as far as we can tell we cannot make any progress without the super collider.” He continued: “Well, who cares? You

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know, there are a lot of people, a lot of Americans, a lot of members of Congress who really see science only in terms of its applications. And that is a respectable view. Not everyone is turned on by the same things. Not everyone likes classical music. Not everyone has this hunger to know why the world is the way it is, and we have to live with that. I find it sad, myself, but that is the way people are.”41 By identifying those who cared only about applications as the SSC’s main opponents, Weinberg disregarded the objection Anderson and others mounted that particle physics was not, in fact, the only route to fundamental physical insight. Weinberg’s testimony throughout the SSC hearings assumed that “without this machine we simply cannot continue the process of uncovering nature’s fundamental laws.”42 His claim was that the United States should fund the SSC not only because it provided fundamental knowledge but also because it was the only route to fundamental knowledge; everything else was derivative. By the early 1990s, the state of the art in reductionism was substantially more virulent than it had been in the 1960s and 1970s.43 Victor Weisskopf considered particle physics the science most fully directed toward fundamental principles, but he saw it as occupying one extreme of a smooth scale rather than as a categorically unique enterprise. The psychological effectiveness of grouping fundamental science with pro-SSC views and applied science with anti-SSC views became evident immediately after Weinberg’s August 1993 testimony when the committee chairman, Senator J. Bennett Johnston Jr., a Louisiana Democrat, introduced the next witness: “a distinguished Nobel laureate. Professor Philip P. Anderson from the Department of  Physics, I think that is Applied Physics, at Princeton University.” Departing from his prepared testimony, Anderson offered two corrections for the record: “Senator Johnston and this committee, and the Democratic National Committee are the only two people who give me the middle initial ‘P’ when my actual middle initial is ‘W.’ And I receive a lot of mail from the Democratic National Committee to Phil P. Anderson. And I am not an applied physicist. I like to call myself a fundamental physicist as well. I just am fundamental in somewhat different ways.”44 Anderson endeavored to undermine Weinberg’s hard and fast distinction between reductionist fundamental physics and applied physics, just as he had sought to undermine Weisskopf ’s distinction between intensive and extensive research two decades earlier. Johnston’s initial error provided him an opportune segue into that argument. Anderson parsed his objections to the SSC in terms of how particle phys-

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ics fit into his own broader view of science. Before the House of Representatives Task Force on Defense, Foreign Policy and Space in 1991 he delivered the same message he would give the Senate: The standard testimony you will receive on behalf of the SSC will tell you that in some sense elementary particle physics, high-energy physics is the bellwether of the sciences, the one which is out there leading the pack, the one which in some sense is investigating the “deepest” layers of reality in the world around us and the “most fundamental” laws of physics. . . . There is at least one other kind of frontier in the physical sciences where a lot of action—and I would argue more action—is taking place: the frontier of looking at bigger and more complex aggregates of matter which often behave in new ways and according to new laws. These new laws don’t contradict the laws the elementary particle people discover; they are simply independent of them, and I would argue they are in no way any less or any [more] fundamental.45

Given the expense of particle physics, Anderson’s testimony continued, what does it contribute in proportion to the funds it receives? How many scientists does it employ? Does the knowledge it produces either motivate practical applications or stimulate research in other areas of science? The answers to these questions should, in his view, determine how science is funded. The implication was clear: if fundamental knowledge could be had for a fraction of the price of the SSC, why spend billions? As condensed matter physicist Theodore Geballe put it, “You are exploring just as much of an unknown, but what you find out is more relevant.”46 Whereas in the 1970s, Anderson had distanced himself from the Weinberg criterion for fear of associating solid state physics too closely with technology, the pressures of the SSC debates caused him and his allies to augment their pluralistic view of fundamental research with arguments for the proximity of their work to applications. Weinberg and Anderson each had agendas that transcended the SSC and framed their testimonies. Congress therefore heard competing views of scientific research and its goals as much as they heard arguments for or against the SSC. That more was at stake than a single research facility is evident from the extent to which the SSC debate spilled over into the popular press. Both Weinberg and Lederman published popular books espousing a reductionist view of science.47 Weinberg took his case to the pages of the New York Times in March 1993 as the SSC’s prospects grew dire. In an op-ed entitled “The Answer to (Almost) Everything,” he appealed to a popular audience with an example about the weather, writing: “Elementary particle physics is more

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fundamental than, say, meteorology, not because it will help us predict the weather, but because there are no independent principles of meteorology that do not rest on the properties of elementary particles.”48 The op-ed angered condensed matter physicists, some of whom shot back. Northwestern University’s Pulak Dutta retorted in a letter to the editor: “The public relations triumph of particle physics is that it has cast itself as the sole heir of atomic physics and quantum mechanics, and thus irrefutably ‘fundamental.’ However . . . we’ve known for some time that elementary particles are made of quarks, but that hasn’t made (and isn’t likely to make) any difference to any other area of human activity. It just isn’t fundamental to anything.”49 Dutta’s rehearsal of Alvin Weinberg’s criterion for scientific choice in the face of Steven Weinberg’s high-proof reductionism reflected the mood among condensed matter researchers. They viewed high energy physicists as demanding extraordinary resources while maligning the intellectual merit of their own endeavors and making unrealistic spin-off claims for a field with little measurable importance to other areas of science and few prospects for making socially or technologically useful contributions. Though reductionist rhetoric had helped secure Fermilab’s funding in the 1960s, it was much less effective with the 1990s Congress, in part because the objections of condensed matter physicists provided political cover. Their arguments were echoed in the statements of the SSC’s legislative opponents. Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, opened a May 1993 hearing by rehearsing arguments solid state physicists had presented: “My first concern is the basic question of priorities. SSC supporters like to suggest that to oppose the SSC is to oppose science. Nothing could be further from the truth. Science is not some indivisible domain but is made up of separate, if related, disciplines.”50 Similarly, in the Senate, Democrat Dale Bumpers of Arkansas brusquely dismissed the argument that particle physics and basic science were one and the same: “The assumption that anybody who opposes this project is opposed to basic science is a distraction and a diversion.”51 The competing view that condensed matter physicists offered helped legislators oppose a major scientific budget item without appearing to be anti-science. The internecine sniping over the SSC ignited a dialogue within physics about the unity, or disunity, of the field. In Physics Today, the widely distributed news magazine published by the American Institute of Physics, discussions of the unity of physics paralleled the debate that played out in congressional testimony and popular writings.52 In a letter published in March 1991,

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Lawrence Cranberg, a retired University of Virginia physicist who studied the physics of wood as it applied to domestic energy needs, wrote that particle physicists showed little interest in work not directly related to their own. He charged that “the quest for unity has become a specialty that narrows so intensely the intellectual focus of its devotees that they are unwilling to be interested in anything else in physics,” and asked, rhetorically: “Is that what we want to encourage when we speak of ‘the unity of physics’? Or does such ‘unity’ condemn one to a snobbish isolation from the mainstream of scientific and human concerns?” Cranberg advocated accepting diversity as an equally potent ideal.53 His criticisms of the high energy physics agenda show that the same tensions that arose over high-stakes projects like the SSC were much deeper, shaping discussions of the discipline’s direction throughout the physics community. The same issue of Physics Today featured two articles from condensed matter physicists arguing for the importance of higher-level phenomena, shoring up the foundations of public arguments against the SSC, and favoring increased support for smaller projects. In the first, University of Chicago theorist Leo Kadanoff wrote on self-organization in physical systems, describing how plumes develop in heated fluids and finding “many different laws and many different levels of description.”54 Kadanoff’s focus on complex phenomena complemented the perspective he had presented as a regular contributor to Physics Today’s “Reference Frame” op-ed page since the mid-1980s. In 1986 he praised the ability to discern between practical and impractical demands for understanding and controlling complex systems as a key component of scientific judgment.55 In 1988 he brought his notion of good scientific judgment to bear on contemporary trends in government science funding: “The true value of science is in the development of beautiful and powerful ideas. Overinvestment in big science detracts from what is really worthwhile. I do not think that the nation’s or the government’s budget for research or for R&D is too small. It is, however, increasingly misdirected toward grandiose projects. We physicists have a responsibility to understand what is truly valuable in science and use this understanding to help the nation develop and express its priorities.”56 Close links between intellectual merit and broader relevance, of the type Anderson expressed before Congress and Kadanoff articulated in Physics Today, became critical to the condensed matter community’s outlook on the organization of science in America in the 1980s and 1990s. Unity, for condensed matter physicists, did not mean reduction, but

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rather the relevance of knowledge at all levels to the whole of physics. Anderson wrote in Physics Today in July 1991: “With the maturation of physics, a new and different set of paradigms began to develop that pointed the other way [from reductionism], toward developing complexity out of simplicity.”57 Diversity and complexity, for solid state researchers working in the shadow of particle physics, were critical prerequisites for unity. They indicated that physical knowledge was interdependent rather than hierarchical, which cemented their claim to fundamental knowledge.58 Throughout the SSC debates, this shared belief gave condensed matter researchers a singleness of purpose that their factionalized field had found wanting for much of its history. By the 1990s, solid state physicists were expressing a consistent view of fundamental knowledge, at least for a national audience. It was similar to what Francis Bitter and Alvin Weinberg described decades earlier. Solid state physicists championed a permissive approach that promoted research across disciplinary boundaries and encouraged diverse applications. Without the reductionist hegemony and its influence on government science funding, though, the position championed by the condensed matter community would never have developed to the extent it did. Virulent reductionism, and the success of its proponents, forced solid state physicists to develop their views on why knowledge of complex systems was not less fundamental than knowledge of simple systems, and on how money and prestige should be distributed accordingly. Anderson’s “More Is Different” responded to brewing discontent in the solid state community while physics was at the height of its prestige. Likewise, the resurgence of the Weinberg criterion among condensed matter physicists, Anderson included, during the SSC debates was driven by angst over conditions that might allow the SSC to dominate the funding landscape as physics as a whole watched its cultural prestige wane. THE MYTH OF THE NON-ZERO-SUM GAIN

Even if they acknowledged that spin-offs were oversold and that the SSC was not the only route to fundamental insight, SSC supporters could fall back on a third, pragmatic justification: that killing the SSC would not free up funds for other kinds of basic research. Furthermore, high energy physicists and their allies argued, such a large federal expenditure was a rising tide. It cemented a federal commitment to basic research, and was thus likely to represent a greater abundance of funds for all types of science in the long run, not less funding. As a result, the physics community was obliged to unite behind

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the option that was on the table. This is what Fleury called “the myth of the non-zero-sum gain.” With respect to the billions of dollars’ worth of appropriations to fund the SSC, the argument that freeing them up would not accrue to the benefit of other areas of science was in some sense correct. Congressman Joe Barton of Texas made this case in 1993 in a bid to save what would have been a boon for his state: “I would prophesize that if we zero out the SSC . . . that money is not going to walk on the water to other applied physics or any other basic science, it is going to, in the best case, not be spent at all—in other words, go to deficit reduction—or it is going to go to other projects that are nonscientific related.”59 Unlike funding for the National Science Foundation of the National Institutes of Health, the SSC’s appropriation was a separate budget item. Its cancellation would not mean that those funds would be redistributed to other deserving scientific projects in the absence of a separate appropriation. However, the case against this argument was about more than the funding earmarked for the SSC; it had to do with the effects that big science projects made on the national research culture. The question, for condensed matter physicists, was not whether the same $11.8 billion required for the SSC might be carved up among other fields, it was whether megascience projects like the SSC produced an overall damaging effect on small science. And that question they answered in the emphatic affirmative. The concern remained that the SSC’s long-term upkeep costs would make future funding appeals more difficult for other projects. Both the scale of big physics projects and the rhetoric used to justify them, condensed matter physicists charged, did damage to other areas of physics by narrowing the definition of basic research and optimizing physics training for particular areas. High energy physicists had made the intellectual game zero sum by insisting on a monopoly over fundamental research. And the skew in the funding environment bled over into pedagogy: teachers and advisers could be expected to devote more attention to more fundable areas, and time in the classroom devoted to some topics was time not exploring others. The first half of this objection contended that the ethos behind the SSC perpetuated the state of affairs in which condensed matter research was viewed only in terms of applications, and again Philip Anderson was the principal messenger. Anderson, in his opposition to the SSC, departed somewhat from the case he had made in “More Is Different” two decades earlier. In the

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early 1970s, the question of funding remained in the background. His SSC testimony repurposed his arguments about the character of scientific knowledge to underwrite a picture of how science funding should be organized. Anderson did not oppose the SSC per se, but objected to the consolidation of financial support for nonapplied research in big-budget particle physics installations while solid state, confined to smaller labs, pursued narrow, practical objectives and found scant opportunity for intellectual curiosity. The narrow focus was a consequence, he believed, of the conflation of fundamentality with reduction. He described fundamental research in solid state as “caught between the Scylla of the glamorous big science projects like the SSC, the genome, and the space station, and the Charybdis of the programmed research, where you have deliverables, where you are asked to do very specific pieces of research aimed at some very short-term goal.”60 Anderson attempted a precarious traverse of this rhetorical Strait of Messina. He advocated funding fundamental research for its own sake and resisted tying funding to preconceived, near-term technological outcomes. He opposed the SSC because, (a) condensed matter was just as fundamental as high energy physics, and (b) funding exploratory condensed matter research with no strings attached would, as a matter of course, produce more socially relevant and technologically valuable results. Condensed matter physics could boast sterling technological bona fides, but advocating funding priority over the SSC strictly on that basis would undercut Anderson’s mission to demonstrate solid state’s intellectual merit. Even if a technological justification would have fallen more musically on many legislators’ ears, condensed matter’s fight for intellectual prestige was too strong a component of its identity for Anderson to sell it short. It was a vision that could never get off the ground in a world in which big physics and fundamental physics were synonymous. The extremophilia of high energy physics and cosmology (figure 9.2) had left condensed matter physicists, and others who worked on mesoscale phenomena, fighting over the dregs of the federal basic research budget or trying to make do with funding that was narrowly targeted and tied to preconceived outcomes. The question of training did not receive quite as much attention as the question of intellectual priorities. It was nevertheless, for Anderson at least, just as critical for assessing the influence of the SSC on the direction of physics. In his written testimony submitted to the House Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development of the Committee on Energy and Natural

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Figure 9.2. Extremophilia in physics, 1988. This cartoon by S. Harris appeared alongside an article critical of the attitudes it illustrates. Leo Kadanoff, “Cathedrals and Other Edifices,” Physics Today 41, no. 2 (1988), 9–11. Reprinted by permission of ScienceCartoonsPlus.com

Resources in 1987, he offered some observations on how the prominence of high energy physics, in terms of both funding and prestige, shaped the way physics was taught. Particle physics, Anderson observed, “dominates many of the most prestigious institutions because the spare change from large contracts in particle

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physics or astrophysics can be used to support junior teaching positions, the glamor of which attracts very able young people in spite of the insecurity of their tenure.” In addition, because skills gained learning condensed matter, chemical, plasma, and other complex systems physics translated more easily into industrial settings, extreme-scale physics ended up overrepresented in the academy. And departments that might have liked to beef up their representation in fields like condensed matter were hampered by the scarcity of federal funding to support research in those areas. As a result, Anderson reported hearing “again and again from students that they just never heard anything from their teachers about any other branches of physics until they reached graduate school, if then.”61 The federal emphasis on big science, in other words, was amplified by feedbacks that heightened the barriers to conducting fundamental research into the properties of complex matter. What might otherwise have been a parochial concern about the relative status of subdisciplines within the programs that produced the country’s physicists was projected into national-scale discourse as a question of scientific staffing. Was the country producing enough physicists, and enough of the right kinds of physicists, to address strategic national priorities? Condensed matter physicists were not above weaponizing nativism to make their point. Krumhansl maintained: “We are not supporting some very capable people. We are not training a sufficient number of Americans and we have become dependent on a steady influx of foreign scientists. We have allowed the funding of impressive facilities to take the support from programs at the individual level.”62 Anderson commented that “it is beginning to be a surprise to hear an American accent in the physics departments of this country because we are having to fill in more and more with immigrants and visitors in our junior positions.”63 Condensed matter physicists might not have been so concerned about their field swinging back toward industry. Industry was, after all, integral to the field’s origins and had midwifed some of its most fundamental contributions. But the industrial laboratories of the 1980s and 1990s were not the industrial laboratories of the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas the latter had bought into farsighted, unprogrammed, long-range research as a basis for technological development, the rise of the innovation economy sifted the “research” out of “research and development” and focused in-house efforts on shortterm gadgeteering.64 If the Bells, GEs, and Westinghouses of the world were not willing to support basic condensed matter research then it would have to occur in the universities and the national laboratories, which left condensed

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matter physicists more susceptible to the whims of federal funding than they were accustomed to and more acutely aware of the deficit they faced with respect to high energy physics. In one sense, the myth of the non-zero-sum gain was no myth at all: canceling the SSC did not, in fact, free up billions for basic condensed matter physics. The bulk of federal funding for basic condensed matter research came from two sources, the National Science Foundation and the DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences (BES) budget. The total NSF research budget grew slowly and steadily through the 1990s, just marginally ahead of inflation, and showed no sign of responding to the SSC’s cancellation.65 Every BES budget request, and every congressional appropriation, for the remainder of the 1990s would be less than the 1993 appropriation. Only in 2000 would BES funding again reach 1993 levels in actual dollars.66 But condensed matter physicists were less concerned with the arithmetic of federal appropriation than they were with the ethos driving it. The question of what happened to the funds from SSC appropriations was secondary to the effects of the dominance of big science—and the monopoly it sought on big questions—in guiding federal funding.67 The direction and mission of physics had been largely left to the discretion of big physicists. In 1989, as Anderson highlighted the rise of mission-oriented research and decried the damage it was doing to condensed matter physics, Burton Richter could comment: “The Department of Energy, from which high-energy physics gets almost all of it[s] money, and from which nuclear physics gets almost of its money, has been rather good about not trying to focus research too tightly or direct it too centrally.”68 That was the sort of control over their field condensed matter physicists felt they had lost while operating in the shadow of big science, and they hoped stopping the SSC would be a first step toward escaping from that shadow. COMPETING PRODUCTIVITY CLAIMS

Condensed matter physicists and high energy physicists were in one sense engaged in an intellectual property dispute throughout the SSC debates. They were not sparring over patent rights, but they were engaged in the type of wider discourse about intellectual property that Christine MacLeod and Gregory Radick identify when they refer to productivity claims, which they define as “claims for bodies of scientific knowledge as having inherently useful offshoots,” in which “the ownership asserted is that of a theoreticalempirical discipline over a domain of technical practice.”69 The SSC debates

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offer a clear example of how this more expansive view of intellectual property is useful. The physicists involved were never in a position to patent the technologies they wanted to claim as products of their fields, but they nonetheless sought to establish some measure of ownership over them and to translate that ownership into material support for further research. The differences in how they set about that task are revealing of the distinct views of the purpose and identity of physics they brought to the SSC debates. The political environment surrounding the SSC encouraged productivity claims. Unlike earlier high energy physics facilities, the SSC demanded a strong argument that it would contribute directly to national economic competitiveness. SSC supporters advanced productivity claims through spin-off rhetoric, aiming to attribute technical accomplishments in areas as diverse as medicine, computing, construction, and manufacturing to high energy physics on the joint basis of its fundamental nature and the demands of accelerator construction. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s, high energy physicists had been aggressively dismissive of connections between their work and technological development, post–Cold War circumstances gave productivity claims new utility. Condensed matter physicists had a longer history of making productivity claims—they suffused the National Research Council reports that traced the field’s development—but that did not decrease their urgency in the early 1990s. It was a period of acute malaise for the field, even as it remained well populated and rich with exciting new research topics. The collapse of Bell was emblematic of a larger deflation of industrial research, weakening the employment market. Former Bell Labs physicist John M. Rowell attributed the decrease in industrial interest in research to a decrease in demand for the knowledge that condensed matter physicists produced. Whereas industrial concerns through mid-century had thrived on robust research operations, late-century corporations succeeded through commercializing existing knowledge—every IBM had its MCI. The attitude prevailing in industry was that “research is essential, but you’d be smart to let someone else do it.”70 Condensed matter physicists therefore had reason to worry whether their productivity claims were potent enough, and competing claims that high energy physicists advanced on what they perceived as some of their proudest technological accomplishments added insult to injury. Their opposition therefore targeted the same technological outcomes that high energy physicists claimed. If it was possible to show that other areas were equally or more productive than high energy physics, the SSC would

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begin to seem like a poor investment. This argument alone would have provided a powerful case against the SSC in the political climate of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and for anyone intent on simply sinking the project, it would have been easy to stop there. But condensed matter physicists were not bent on destruction. Their primary objective was to promote a friendlier climate for their own research. For high energy physicists, productivity claims were a way of making a field that legislators were inclined to find remote seem more relevant. But condensed matter physicists faced the somewhat different challenge of reinforcing their existing, if problematic claims to technical relevance without binding themselves too tightly to technology and undercutting their claim to support for exploratory research. This required showing that their intellectual standing was on a par with high energy physics, which they aimed to do by subverting reductionism. The justifications that condensed matter physicists had developed for their field through the mid-1980s, which suggested that basic research could be expected to yield fruitful results and pointed to the track record of solid state physics doing just that, were inadequate to address the unique challenge that late twentieth-century megascience posed. They gave no guidance for distinguishing the potentially applicable from the eternally abstruse. Rowall argued further that condensed matter physicists had to “face the possibility that the changes in industrial research labs over the past 20 years constitute an expression of dissatisfaction with our contributions over that time.”71 Making the case against the SSC and in favor of greater support for basic condensed matter research required moving beyond both the uncut emergentism Anderson had peddled in “More Is Different” and the general arguments for the fecundity of basic research that marked the early rhetoric of condensed matter physics. Finding both of these justifications inadequate for the purposes at hand, condensed matter physicists suggested more pointedly that some areas of fundamental inquiry were, in fact, inherently closer to useful applications than others. Their position was a reaction both to the failure of emergentism to make a case for their field’s economic relevance, and the failure of simple basic research rhetoric either to explain why condensed matter physics was a better investment than high energy physics or to advance its aspirations to intellectual prestige. Arguments for the importance of basic research historically rested on the premise that it is impossible to know in advance which basic research would turn out to be useful and which would not. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, condensed matter physicists rejected that premise explicitly. The essence of

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the resulting position can be summarized by some of the sharper criticisms Anderson leveled at the SSC. He let his frustration show in asserting, “Science can be fundamental without being irrelevant.”72 At another point he would contend: “The basic science of today—except for particle physics and much of space science—is the technology of tomorrow.”73 Basic research, that is, does not always feed the wellspring of technology. Its fruitfulness depends on its proximity to the domains of knowledge that most often make themselves useful for technical applications. A position of this sort was necessary to distinguish a field unfamiliar for most legislators from one that was much more visible. Refining their productivity claims in the context of the SSC debates prompted condensed matter physicists to build a more explicit and positive connection between their sense of their work’s intellectual importance and their convictions about its technological fruitfulness. A focus on what might appear to be mundane substances and subjects had not historically been an asset for solid state physics. Whereas high energy physics and cosmology benefited from frontier rhetoric, solid state physicists worked at the scale of the everyday, making it more difficult to claim that they were pushing into unexplored territory.74 Arguing for the inherently greater proximity of basic condensed matter physics to practical outcomes helped shift these dynamics in condensed matter physicists’ favor. Their objections to the SSC rested, in line with the three dimensions explored above, on insisting that high energy physics was remote, undistinctive, and extortionate. Anderson testified, “I think our Japanese competitors have shown, and I sincerely believe, (and, in my own career, have shown by example) that the race is much more often won by ‘doing what comes naturally,’ and looking around at mundane subjects like glass or conducting oxides. Dollar for dollar, we in condensed matter physics have spun off a lot more billions than they have, and we can honestly promise to continue to do so.”75 The physics of the mundane, in other words, if left to its own devices, was both intellectually valuable and predisposed to lead in useful directions, and those benefits could be had at a fraction of the astronomical cost of the SSC. This line of argument was a synthesis of a half century of thinking about solid state and condensed matter physics that brought together the various and sometimes divergent strands of the field. Early arguments on behalf of solid state physics had prioritized bringing industrial researchers in from the cold. In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial research became much better integrated into the infrastructure of American physics and, by the time of the SSC debates, condensed matter physicists shifted to advancing the field’s place

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within the intellectual hierarchy of American science. The case presented in opposition to the SSC was a way to link these strands and present an image of condensed matter physics as a field that could both fuel the American economy and advance the intellectual ambitions of American physics. By taking the unprecedented step of publicly and vociferously opposing their colleagues’ flagship project, those in condensed matter physics were auditioning their own view of the field as the dominant mode of interaction between physics and American society. The SSC’s demise, in the face of gargantuan cost overruns and management difficulties, might seem to depend little on such opposition, which might have done little more than provide a small measure of political cover for skeptical legislators. But it did represent the success that solid state and condensed matter physicists had attained over a half century of crafting a professional identity that spoke to the founding mission of the American Physical Society while simultaneously embracing technological relevance. EPILOGUE: SOLID STATE AND THE NEW BIG SCIENCE

In 1967, the eminent laser physicist Arthur Schawlow wrote to Felix Bloch, “It may be that the theory of solid and liquid states is now so complicated that one has to allow time for a man to reach a broad perspective.”76 He referred to the training required before promising theorists of the day could be expected to make groundbreaking contributions, but the same observation might be applied to the history of solid state and condensed matter physics. Growing historical perspective often prompts a search for continuities across what were previously understood as radical shifts. Historians have revisited the dramatic changes that occurred in the scientific revolution to show how the supposedly new way of looking at the world that appeared in the Enlightenment drew liberally from medieval thought and practice. They have reexamined the quantum and relativity revolutions to emphasize their debt to nineteenth-century physics. They have sought out the roots of big science— often considered the product of an abrupt reconfiguration of the practice of science during the Second World War—in the 1920s and 1930s, and sometimes earlier.77 They will no doubt look in earnest for the bridges of stability that spanned the turbulent end to the Cold War. When they do, condensed matter physics is certain to be among them. The death of the SSC presents a dramatic and powerful discontinuity. “It symbolized the end of an era for physics in the United States,” according to Daniel Kevles’s assessment, published two years after the House of Repre-

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sentatives yanked the project’s funding.78 The SSC’s demise marked the end of the US government’s previously ironclad commitment to large-scale physics built on the reductionist program. It more broadly signaled the moment when physics was unseated, in favor of biology, as the marquee American science. Kevles suggested that the SSC’s demise in 1993 culminated a process begun in the 1970s that eroded the sky-high authority and unique privilege physics had enjoyed in American society and politics during the early Cold War, and made it just as responsive to the prevailing political winds as any other interest group. How does the story of solid state physics reframe that picture? First, as the struggles of solid state physics show, the better part of American physics had been buffeted on the political winds that sunk the SSC for much longer, so the physics community, understood more broadly, already contained substantial expertise navigating them. Second, mixing solid state back into the story means that we do not need to understand the SSC in simple declensionist terms. The opposition to the SSC from within physics highlights how the SSC’s absence changed the research landscape in ways that created new possibilities for American physics. This standpoint allows us focus on a long-term transition through the 1980s and 1990s, which shifted major US facilities away from high-energy accelerators and toward multiuser facilities hosted both at universities, such as Cornell, and at national laboratories, such as the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven, the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne, and the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge.79 These facilities of the “new big science,” as Robert P. Crease and Catherine Westfall call it, are adaptable to multiple research programs, friendly to outside user groups, including those from industry, and, unlike forefront high energy facilities, are forced to compete for those users with similar installations around the world.80 They were designed with fields like solid state physics and materials science in mind, and soon found eager constituencies in structural biology and biomedicine, pharmaceutical research, and even art history and archaeology. The machines of the new big science have much in common with the National Magnet Laboratory, which similarly was rooted in solid state physics and was therefore designed without reference to a narrow theoretical program, making it relevant to an assortment of external user groups. Seen against this backdrop, the failure of the SSC appears much less discontinuous. Solid state had been pulling American physics further toward technological usefulness, industrial collaboration, and extradisciplinary rel-

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evance for decades. It was a natural next step to bring the landmark, federally funded physical research facilities along with it. The questions that arise when we try to understand the complex research ecology that emerges within a synchrotron radiation facility in the early twenty-first century have much in common with the questions we have to confront when trying to understand the complex constellation of research problems, theoretical approaches, experimental techniques, and institutional contexts that was solid state physics in the mid-twentieth century. American physics lived with a secret for decades: almost since its formation, it had been routinely unfaithful to its espoused ideals. But it was that very unfaithfulness that allowed it to hold on to those ideals for so long. The steady drumbeat of technical labor carried out by solid state physicists kept the public and policymakers comfortable that, whatever the rhetoric issuing from the priests of the field, it would ultimately produce something useful. The new big science represents, in some sense, an abandonment of Henry Rowland’s pure science ideal. But it is also a recognition of physics as a highly heterogeneous field, and one solicitous of the society that supports it.

CONCLUSIONS

A pluralistic society rarely has consensual goals except in reaction to some external threat (e.g., war, trade competition, waning national influence) or some internal danger (e.g., depression, insurrection, environmental degradation). Lacking such challenges, each man tends to go his own way. —COSMAT, 1975

Henry Rowland, who guided American physics into the twentieth century, would not have recognized it at the dawn of the twenty-first. It had grown well over a thousandfold, had subdivided in ways he would have found irrational and bizarre, and had become financially dependent on industrial largesse in a way he would have found profoundly worrying.1 His influence nevertheless remained. The tension between Rowland’s pure science ideal and the pragmatism of the American context never fully resolved, and it proved productive. Solid state physics was torn between its desire to uphold the pure science ideal and its ability to leverage its technological relevance through the second half of the twentieth century. Striving for purity made solid state relevant to the conceptual core of physics; continued technological relevance enabled the most abstract portions of physics to thrive within an environment that might otherwise have been hostile to them. The back and forth between the pure science ideal and the allure of technical and economic rewards prompted physics to broaden its scope in mid-century, motivated new approaches to fundamental knowledge, and ultimately remade the identity of American physics. Solid state physics was such an unruly alliance that understanding it as a whole requires examining its institutional manifestations. That standpoint

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reveals a story of how it gradually reformed the institutions of American physics to be more conducive to its needs. The American Physical Society (APS) developed more mechanisms to accommodate industrial and applied physics. The Physical Review split and devoted one section to solid state physics. Large installations like the National Magnet Laboratory dedicated much of their research to solid state questions. These institutional developments were shaped by the ambivalence of American physics toward its pure science mission in the face of its manifest technological relevance. They gave the most technologically, economically, and militarily relevant portion of physics the space to succeed, and in doing so shored up the relevance of physics for American society. The solid state insurrection, which mobilized against the institutions and ideals that carried on Rowland’s legacy, proceeded on three fronts. It was a revolt against the marginalization of applied physics, against the traditional understanding of disciplines, and against the excesses of megascience. For much of the later twentieth century, solid state and condensed matter physicists considered themselves a persecuted plurality, fighting to bring the institutions that guided and controlled American physics, which for the most part took nuclear and high energy physics as the default, more in line with their interests. Like most insurgencies, the solid state insurrection was wracked by internal disagreement and division, but it also succeeded in shifting the center of American physics, which, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, was more accepting of applied research, more flexible in defining its subfields, and less beholden to very large facilities. By way of conclusion, I will review these fronts on which the solid state insurrection advanced, each of which shows how viewing American physics from the standpoint of solid state and condensed matter physics can promote a more complete understanding of the history of American physics as a whole. APPLIED PHYSICS COMES IN FROM THE COLD

In 2014, the American Physical Society added a twelfth journal to the Physical Review family. Physical Review Applied appeared with a mandate to publish the “highest quality papers at the intersection of physics and engineering, with the goal of bridging the artificial divide between these fields.”2 As similar changes to the publishing and professional landscape unfolded from the 1930s through 1950s, physicists considered a number of divides to be artificial—between metals and solids, solids and other forms of matter, indus-

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try and academia, even, at times, physics and chemistry. But the line between physics and engineering usually remained bright.3 The road that made it possible for a branch of the Physical Review, the inner sanctum of pure science in mid-century, to declare physics and engineering of a piece was circuitous, but it began with the first stirrings of the solid state insurrection. The thread of physics publishing that runs through this book illustrates the ebbs and flows of the status of applied and industrial physics in the United States, and the manner in which solid state physics influenced them. Journals proliferated to serve applied physicists in the first few decades of the twentieth century. These fell into three categories. Some were launched by professional societies with a strong applied focus, such as the Journal of the Optical Society of America, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and the Journal of Rheology, which sought to create new communities and forums for applied physics that the APS was not providing. Others found their start as part of efforts to stem the influx of submissions to the Physical Review. Technology and instrument-focused research constituted the bulk of the flow targeted for diversion into the Journal of Applied Physics and Review of Scientific Instruments. Following the formation of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in the 1930s, journals such as the Journal of Chemical Physics and the American Journal of Physics created outlets for specialties that were otherwise underserved. The cumulative effect was to narrow the Physical Review’s focus, in tandem with the quantum revolution, which encouraged an increase in theoretical papers, reaffirming its status as a pure science journal and signaling the continuing marginal status of applied physics, in spite of its growth. The 1940s brought widespread hand-wringing about the sorry state of the academia-industry relationship. Solid state physics established itself as a division of the APS, and as a recognized subdiscipline of physics, in response to those anxieties. It was not obvious that the loose constellation of activities that became solid state physics would be fully or even mostly classified as physics. But the fact that they were had consequences for the publishing habits of solid state physicists. Papers in the Physical Review were the coin of the realm. The rapid and substantial increase in the population of solid state physicists through the late 1940s and early 1950s contributed significantly to a new wave of pressure on the APS’s flagship journal, which began to suffer from backlogs and budget deficits. These considerations blossomed into the publication problem of the mid-

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1950s, with the Physical Review operating at a loss and unable to promise rapid publication. Solid state physicists seriously considered ordaining the Journal of Chemical Physics the principal publication outlet for the field, or creating a new journal of record for solid state physics de novo. Such proposals were abandoned in favor of a resolution to build solid state into a mainstream physics subfield, which aspired to be of sufficient interest to other physicists to merit inclusion in its general-interest journal. Solid state physics in the 1950s, fractious and compartmentalized by research topic, inspired some to worry that it might drift away from the core identity of physics to explore collaborative opportunities with neighboring fields. The decision to play the game on the terms set by the APS and the Physical Review meant that the fate of American physics and the fate of solid state physics, applied baggage and all, became linked. Solid state physics, in short, was the principle vector that introduced applied research into the mainstream of American physics. Solid state would succeed in its bid to install itself as a mainline physics subfield. The Physical Review would fragment in 1970, with one of the four sections dedicated to solid state physics and related fields. The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of condensed matter physics, an evolution from solid state physics that sought a more consistent disciplinary identity and more traditional emphasis on pure science values. Nevertheless, proximity to technological applications remained a point of pride for what was now by far the largest segment of American physics. By the time the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was canceled in 1993, a significant portion of the physics community had learned to wear their applied relevance comfortably. The condensed matter outlook on physics was not so much the clear victor of the SSC debates as it was the position that was left standing. The high-powered reductionism that had infused pure science rhetoric emanating from the particle physics community suffered a serious blow with the death of the SSC. Even before the project’s cancellation, the likes of Steven Weinberg and Leon Lederman were moved to distance themselves from the rampant spin-off claims that diluted the intellectual and cultural arguments in favor of high-price high energy physics. SSC spin-off claims, however, were pale echoes of much stronger arguments for technological relevance that solid state and condensed matter physicists had been making for some time. Moving into the twentieth century, these assumed a much larger role in American physics. The declaration in Physical Review Applied that the barriers separating physics from engineering were artificial and worth demolishing

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is one legacy of the momentum solid state physics gradually imparted to the American physics community, nudging it away from a pure science ideal and toward acceptance of technological relevance. THE CHANGING SHAPE OF PHYSICAL DISCIPLINES

Physics is what physicists decide it is. American physicists themselves, however, failed to tap into that agency for much of the early twentieth century. The dawning realization in the 1940s that disciplinary boundaries could be gerrymandered to suit immediate professional needs gave physicists a powerful and flexible tool to organize a rapidly growing population and to manage the divergent and sometimes competing interests of the groups that emerged within it. Solid state physics was the most immediate and the most successful result of this realization. Organizing around something other than a supposedly natural category made it outré in the 1940s and 1950s, but its success presaged further deliberate efforts to strategically engineer and sometimes undermine disciplinary structure later in the twentieth century. Paul Forman has identified in the late twentieth century an era of transition from disciplinarity to antidisciplinarity, coinciding with a larger cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism. The notion of disciplines as distinct and formalized bodies of professional knowledge and practice, Forman argues, is of surprisingly recent historical vintage, a product of a mid-century modernist emphasis on professional discipline (in the sense of learned self-control) and expertise. The 1960s and 1970s, though, saw the beginnings of an antidisciplinary reaction, which disparaged disciplines as Procrustean impediments to both epistemic and social progress.4 The rise of solid state physics coincides with the era in which Forman locates this transition, and presents a telling illustration of how physicists were negotiating the concept of disciplinarity both in its heyday and through its decline. It is an amusing irony that one of solid state’s key contributions to the organization of American science—its self-consciously conventional outer boundary—was the very characteristic that made it idiosyncratic when it formed. It is also fitting that the field dedicated to studying complex physical systems was itself such a complex disciplinary assembly. Solid state pioneered a new mode of disciplinary organization, one that ran counter to the prevailing mid-century wisdom. Contemporary resistance aside, it would soon inspire imitators. Materials science, a product of early 1960s efforts to combine basic scientific research in the physical sciences with engineering efforts targeted at strategic materials, was likewise a discipline by convention,

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assembled in large part to capitalize on the stated preferences of powerful funders. A similar pattern would unfold later in the century with the advent of nanoscience and nanotechnology, which grew not from a set of problems or practices, but from an opportunistic reaction to federal development priorities and accompanying funding opportunities.5 Solid state, as an antecedent to these and other developments, therefore provides a powerful basis from which to understand disciplines and their influence over scientific discourse during the twentieth century, when the rapidly growing population of scientists favored new modes of organization. Furthermore, the solid state example clarifies the importance of disciplinary identity for mediating scientific authority, governing prestige disputes, and guiding resource allocation. The lack of a clean research- or concepts-based answer to the question “what is it that solid state physicists did?” focuses attention on the sense of professional solidarity that unified the field for decades. Through the second half of the twentieth century, physics as a whole came to resemble a constellation of loosely related interests like solid state physics much more than it resembled the conceptually coherent discipline that physicists like John Van Vleck had sought to preserve in the face of 1940s divisionalization. Narratives driven by the proliferation of quantum mechanics and efforts to hasten theoretical unification often obscure this evident state of affairs. But the evolution of the professional infrastructure of American physics—a story to which solid state was central—was a progression away from the early twentieth-century Rowlandian vision of a community unified by full-throated advocacy of pure research. The APS sprouted divisions beginning in the early 1940s, initiating a process of specialization and compartmentalization that continued for the rest of the century.6 Physics Today launched in 1948, boasting of its egalitarian editorial policy. From the 1960s on, growing numbers of physicists participated in new interdisciplinary fields such as materials science. All these factors indicate that physics steadily became a bigger tent with thinner walls through the second half of the twentieth century. Understanding how and why solid state formed therefore offers a case study, on a smaller scale, of how American physics evolved. The nature of physics changed as membership in the disciplinary community became less a matter of working on a small set of communally sanctioned problems and more about training and self-identification. As with the condensed matter movement with respect to solid state, there was some pushback against this

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development within physics. The push for grand unification and the strong reductionist impulse that drove high energy physics from the 1960s through the 1990s, however, appears in a different light if considered as a counterpoint to a diversifying field than it does when presented as the central narrative of American physics. Solid state can encourage a more complete historical understanding of American physics in the later twentieth century by itself being a microcosm of how the larger community was structured. MEGASCIENCE UNDERMINED

If the interests of applied science provided the impetus for the solid state insurrection, and the reimagining of physical disciplines was its consequence, then ressentiment brought about by the excesses of big science was its fuel. Prestige looms largest to those who feel they lack their fair share. Solid state physicists spent much of the Cold War watching their opposite numbers in nuclear and particle physics reap the social, political, and pecuniary benefits of physics’ newfound cultural visibility. Much of that visibility came in the form of historically large installations. As particle physicists probed smaller and smaller elements of the atom, the machines they used to do it grew, and the solid state community’s status consciousness heightened in direct proportion. Many a solid state physicist sported a chip on the shoulder, and that pugnacious streak flavored the field’s professional story from the 1960s on.7 The installations of big science were monumental. They were, of course, physically large. But an enormous particle accelerator could also function, in the words Daniel Kleppner, “as a monument to our National aspirations.”8 Kleppner, an atomic physicist, supported the SSC, although he echoed solid state physicists’ admonitions that it should not be supported at the expense of other areas of science. By identifying the monumental function the SSC and other large accelerators served, Kleppner nevertheless articulated one of the principle frustrations solid state and condensed matter physicists had with big science. Monuments, in the popular imagination, celebrate particular parts of an event or enterprise at the expense of others. Understanding high energy particle accelerators as monuments to national scientific accomplishment implied a particular slant on what types of scientific accomplishments were important to the nation. Solid state physics lacked a monument on which it could pin its aspirations. A field dispersed among laboratories across academic, industrial, and governmental institutions, supporting an abundance of research programs, solid state did not lend itself to physics by monolithic machine. Many in the

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field responded by rebelling against monumentalism itself, suggesting that large, sui generis facilities were a poor investment and damaging to the health of the rest of science—the attitude that framed the scientific case against the SSC. It would be a stretch to call the death of the SSC a victory for small science. It did not yield increased interest in funding exploratory research on the lab-bench scale or reduce demands for well-articulated technical or commercial outcomes that came with much small-science funding. It did, however, signal the closing of an era in American science in which the reductionist view of physics championed by the high energy community would exert outsized influence on national-scale science policy. Opposition to the funding structure implied by big science was intimately linked to opposition to the reductionist philosophy. Although high energy physicists often presented reductionism as the principle that had propelled physics for millennia, dating to ancient Greek atomism, the flavor of reductionism that guided high energy research in the latter half of the twentieth century is more properly understood as a new intellectual framework, developed from and for the research program that led to the standard model of particle physics. The emergentism developed by Philip Anderson and other condensed matter physicists, which maintained the conceptual independence of concepts at higher scales of complexity, was likewise drawn from the phenomena of condensed matter physics. But in addition to codifying conceptual differences between the high- and low-energy domains, philosophical disagreements about reduction and emergence had wide-ranging consequences for the self-image of physics and its organization. They contested whether the hard core of fundamental physics should remain an exclusive club or widen into a big tent. Reductionism was a near necessity to underwrite the claims that large expensive facilities were necessary to push forward the boundaries of fundamental knowledge. If, however, fundamental insight could be gained at any scale of organization, then the national commitment to science as culture could reasonably be spread more widely. For this reason, philosophical arguments about the epistemic characteristics of fundamental knowledge formed an integral component of condensed matter physicists’ case against the SSC. Condensed matter physicists not only fought against megascience because it sequestered resources for basic research in a few large facilities but also because they smarted at the intellectual avarice of the reductionist move to monopolize fundamental knowledge. American physics would not come

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to embrace applied relevance as part of its identity without those areas that boasted this relevance first demonstrating that they could contribute to the intellectual core of physics. The struggles of solid state physicists to carve out space for their research and publicize their accomplishments while laboring in the shadow of big physics also has lessons for how to tell the history of twentieth-century science. The monuments it erected stand out in our vista of the past, but the most imposing features of the skyline are often only dimly representative of the surrounding terrain where most people spend most of their time. Solid state physicists, scattered throughout the foothills of mountainous big science installations, accounted for a much larger proportion of scientific output in the late twentieth century. Their resentment of big science was not simply a matter of turning up their noses at high-hanging fruit, but of advocacy for a system of support and accountability that better reflected the demographics of American physics. MAKING AMERICAN PHYSICS MATTER

The story of the solid state insurrection invites revisiting standard narratives of American physics in the twentieth century, many of which have been shaped by the Inward Bound narrative, articulated in Abraham Pais’s book of that title. Pais presents the twentieth century as a voyage into the atom, which uncovered the deepest and most fundamental secrets of nature among the most basic constitution of matter and revolutionized our understanding of the universe.9 Rarely is the focus on particle physics as the basis for the rest of the discipline so restrictive and explicit as in Inward Bound, yet particle physics has stood in for physics in general in many of the most influential historiographical movements of recent years. Historians of physics think about the relationship between theory and experiment and the nature of physical knowledge through the lens of bubble chambers, weak neutral currents, and quarks, approach pedagogy through Feynman diagrams, and understand laboratory culture through the stories of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Fermilab.10 The cumulative result is that the reductionist narrative that particle physics themselves favored has become the backbone of the historiography of twentieth-century physics. But from another perspective, the advances in nuclear and subnuclear physics after about 1930 might seem provincial and incremental. By 1930, with the discovery of the neutron, physicists had a clear idea of the elements

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of nuclear structure. Nuclear physics, without a doubt, proved its importance in dramatic fashion during the Second World War. But both the Manhattan Project and subsequent bomb and reactor work were principally engineering enterprises. So far as the basic physics of nuclear matter is concerned, the rest of the century succeeded only in fleshing out the picture that was largely in place by 1930 and pushing it back one level to develop a sense of subnucleonic structure—an achievement to be sure, but a parochial one, given that the phenomena in question can only be created and observed in highly specialized laboratories. From this perspective, the real action of twentieth-century physics unfolded elsewhere. Anyone walking along a black-sand beach in Hawaii, or New Zealand, or Hong Kong can observe, without instrumentation, the property of ferromagnetism in the magnetite deposits that give these beaches their distinctive color. Yet that phenomenon and many other easily observed properties of matter remained mysterious before the advent of theoretical and experimental techniques developed within solid state physics. From this perspective, the most active frontier of the twentieth century was not the highenergy frontier, but the complexity frontier. It was the demystification of the properties of complex matter and the applications of those properties, which remade our technological world, from home computing, stereo equipment, and cookware to communication, transportation, medicine, and warfare. This is a tendentious framing, but it serves a purpose: it exposes the historiographical contingency of the disproportionate focus on nuclear physics, high energy physics, and cosmology, alongside the historical contingency of the dominance those fields assumed over public discourse about physics in the second half of the twentieth century. Two counterfactual scenarios help to probe that contingency further, each of which offers heuristic utility by throwing into relief the role solid state physics played, despite lacking the public acclaim of its sibling subfields, in securing the prominence of American physics.11 First, given the high degree of institutional volatility in the early post– Second World War era, it is easy to imagine a counterfactual scenario in which solid state physicists migrate away from physics and into chemistry, metallurgy, and engineering, much as electrical engineering had some decades earlier. It was a contingency about which the field’s founders actively worried, and the American Physical Society council was demonstrably squeamish about clearing the type of institutional space that would give the society a more industrial flavor. Without solid state, which accounted for a

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large proportion of the postwar population boom, physics would have stayed smaller and grown more slowly.12 The publishing crisis of the 1950s would have been managed by directing solid state work into the journals of other fields. Most important, the technical accomplishments of solid state physics would have accrued to the benefit of those other fields. In that scenario, it is difficult to imagine how American physics would have maintained the political will necessary to continue the megascience projects that became its most recognizable and best-publicized accomplishments. Physics would no doubt have enjoyed a period of visibility and influence on the coattails of nuclear weapons, but the half-life of that influence would likely have been much shorter. Physics was founded, proudly, on the fringes of American values, and in direct opposition to some of them. Solid state was instrumental in challenging that parochialism and making American physics more responsive to the needs of society in which it was embedded. In contrast, many particle physicists, deeply disillusioned with weapons research, sharpened their notion of scientific purity to an even finer point. Such an attitude would have been difficult to sustain without a branch of physics that dedicated itself to exploring the areas that were of immediate relevance in the Cold War and supported the perception that physics was continually, not merely occasionally, useful. We can imagine a second counterfactual scenario in which the Manhattan Project never acquired the scale or resources it needed to construct a working bomb before the end of the war in the Pacific. Perhaps Leo Szilard failed to find Albert Einstein, who never cosigned his fateful letter to Franklin Roosevelt demanding a US response to the German nuclear program. Perhaps Gregory Breit remained, unhappily, the Coordinator of Rapid Rupture and was not able to instill the famous esprit that marked J. Robert Oppenheimer’s directorship of the Los Alamos laboratory. Suppose, for whatever reason, the Second World War ends without a dramatic, public demonstration of the power of the nucleus. It is hard to imagine that nuclear weapons research would not have continued, but it would have done so in secret, under the guidance of a very different postwar order. Nuclear physicists would not have been catapulted to celebrity in quite the same way and high energy physics would thus not have benefited from the public prominence that the psychological power of nuclear weapons brought to microphysics. In this second scenario, solid state physicists would have been well positioned to become much more politically influential in the early Cold War, in particular on the strength of radar research, which, in the absence of the

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bomb, would likely have dominated narratives about physicists’ contributions to the war effort. Nuclear physicists, shackled both by secrecy regimes and doubts about the success and cost effectiveness of their proposal for a super weapon, would have faced greater difficulty gaining political and cultural traction. It would be reasonable to expect a much more rapid embrace of applied relevance from American physicists—not an insurrection but a coup, much like the one that catapulted molecular biology to the forefront of biology around the same time. Historians would look back on Rowland’s ideals as quixotic, marvel that physicists were able to sustain them even into mid-century, and find the roots of their demise in the interwar restructuring of the journal and society infrastructure. The purpose of a counterfactual should always be to give us a fresh perspective on the factual. These scenarios, which probe intuitions about what factors shaped postwar physics, show us that the history of twentieth-century American physics does not fit together without the story of solid state physics contributing answers to some of the most compelling questions about it. How and why did physics gain such prominence so quickly and maintain it for so long? What did it mean to be a physicist in the United States and how did that identity change over time? How do physicists negotiate what it means for knowledge to be fundamental? These are questions that get to the core of why the history of physics matters, and the answers to them look quite different, as I have argued here, when taking the experiences of solid state physicists into account. The counterfactual exercise above also makes clear that the precise trajectory that the twentieth century did take conspired to mask the significance of solid state physics within it. High energy physics, in spite of its scorn for the types of short-term technological ends that the security state often demanded, was well adapted to the cultural moment of the Cold War. The James Bond films provide an analogy that makes this compatibility clear. The Bond series is among the longest running in cinema, and its titular character one of the most recognizable fictional figures in Western popular culture. But when Daniel Craig took over as the franchise’s leading man, the familiar character took an unfamiliar turn. No longer did the debonair spy’s copious consumption of vodka martinis merely make his aim truer as he battled outsized supervillains and their Rube Goldberg–esque plans for world domination. Instead, Bond was represented as a fraying alcoholic, buckling under the emotional toll of his job as his demons threatened to undermine his fight against enemies created by his own country’s malfeasance. Unlike the Cold

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War Bond made famous by Sean Connery—the product of a world painted in black and white—Craig’s depiction befits a world that struggles to come to terms with stateless enemies, indiscriminate electronic surveillance, and the morality of drone strikes. Set against the Manichaeism of the Cold War, Connery’s Bond made sense. Craig, in turn, plays a messy Bond for a messy world. But the dyads of capitalism and communism, East and West, good and evil, that played so strongly on Cold War psychology evince the masking, not the absence, of underlying complexities.13 In physics, as in the geopolitics of the Cold War, the messiness was there all along, but we have been at times ideologically indisposed to notice it. The picture of physics as divided between reductionist, fundamental research on one hand and derivative, applied physics on the other was powerful to physicists—especially during the Cold War, when it fit the spirit of the times—and it has imprinted the history of physics as well. Telling the story of Cold War physics requires peeling back this seductive veneer and confronting the messiness of Schmutzphysik. It was not a consensus ideological vision, compatible with the demands of a Cold War context, that made physics such a successful science; it was the ideological diversity that allowed it to adapt to the many niches that a complex context offered.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION. What Is Solid State Physics and Why Does It Matter?

Epigraph: Gregory H. Wannier, quoted in an untitled document, 1943, CRS, folder 3. 1. Establishing Priorities in Science Funding: Hearing Before the Task Force on Defense, Foreign Policy and Space of the Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, 102nd Cong. 67 (July 11 and 18, 1991) (statement of Philip W. Anderson, Ph.D., Joseph Henry Professor, Princeton University). The terms “particle physics” and “high energy physics” were used interchangeably around this time, and are used that way in this book. 2. The relationship between these two names, which is not unproblematic, is discussed in chapter 8. 3. Studies of discipline formation have focused principally on how communities coalesce around research problems and techniques, or on how practitioners become “disciplined” through pedagogical programs and professionalization procedures, both formal and informal. Representative examples include: Jackson, “Chemistry as the Defining Science,” which shows how the growth of strong laboratories created the conditions in which consensus practices could emerge, aiding the establishment of chemistry as a discipline in nineteenth-century Germany; Long, “William McElroy,” which examines how the suite of new problems posed by molecular genetics contributed to the emergence of biochemistry; and Lenoir and Lécuyer, “Instrument Makers,” which emphasizes how the distinctive set of practices that spring up around instruments and instrument making help assemble disciplinary communities. Others have challenged the universality of this approach, especially in the realm of more recent science, when communities became larger, more complex, and more politically engaged. See, for example, Good, “Assembly of Geophysics.” I follow Good in understanding disciplines as flexible tools that can be used to solve professional and institutional problems as well as conceptual ones. 4. Hoddeson et al., Out of the Crystal Maze, viii. 5. These, for instance, were the primary categories identified by the War Policy Committee of the American Institute of Physics in the early 1940s. Klopsteg, “Work of the War Policy Committee.” 6. Although often repeated, the origins of this apparently verbal remark are unclear. It had entered particle physics lore by 1966 at the latest, when Murray Gell-Mann repeated it at the 13th International Conference on High-Energy Physics. Gell-Mann, “Current Topics in Particle Physics.” 7. Daniels and Krige, “Beyond the Reach.” I thank John Krige for sharing a preprint of this paper with me. 8. In a similar manner, we see the history of science differently if we start from the perspective of applied science. Johnson, “What If We Wrote?”; Mody, “Toward a History of Science.”

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9. The most comprehensive account of the SSC’s rise and fall is Riordan, Hoddeson, and Kolb, Tunnel Visions. 10. See Kaiser, “Atomic Secret,” for an account of how the Manhattan Project developed its popular reputation as a triumph of theoretical physics, rather than of metallurgy, chemistry, and engineering. 11. On the postwar prestige of physicists, see Kevles, Physicists, and Brown, Dresden, and Hoddeson, “Pions to Quarks.” Robert W. Seidel has situated the origins of the growing prestige of American physics slightly before the war in the success of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Seidel, “Origins of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.” On the increased influence of physics on policymaking, see, in addition to Kevles, Physicists, Kleinman, Politics on the Endless Frontier. 12. See Kevles, “Big Science.” 13. Missner, “Why Einstein Became Famous.” 14. Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, is the origin of a broad historiographical consensus. Studies building on Dupree’s work have explored the details of the mechanisms that enacted the federal government’s newly robust commitment to funding scientific research. See: England, Patron for Pure Science; Thibodeau, “Science in the Federal Government”; Kleinman, Politics on the Endless Frontier; Edgerton, “Time, Money, and History.” 15. Westwick, National Labs; Crease, Making Physics; Seidel, “National Laboratories” and “Home for Big Science.” 16. Hecht, “Atomic Hero.” 17. Doel, “Scientists as Policymakers”; Weart, Scientists in Power; Finkbeiner, Jasons. 18. Hoddeson, Kolb, and Westfall, Fermilab. 19. Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets, 43. 20. Stevens, “Fundamental Physics.” 21. Bridger, Scientists at War, 270. 22. Rowland, “Highest Aim,” 828. 23. Joas, “Campos que interagem.” 24. I largely avoid engaging with the many interesting issues in the conceptual history of solid state and condensed matter physics, which do not present a cohesive story of the field and have been considered piecemeal by others. For an overview of these works, see the section “Conceptual Development of Research Programs,” in Martin, “Resource Letter,” 91–93. 25. The fear that particle accelerators might create minuscule black holes that would grow and engulf the planet was the source of protests directed at both the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. For an edifying history of these fears, and a discussion of the legal issues surrounding injunctions filed on the basis of them, see Johnson, “Black Hole Case.” CHAPTER 1. THE PURE SCIENCE IDEAL AND ITS MALCONTENTS

Epigraph: Rowland, “Highest Aim,” 825. 1. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:48. 2. See Warwick, Masters of Theory. 3. On physics in Prussian secondary education, see Olesko, “Physics Instruction” and Physics as a Calling. On the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, see Cahan, Institute for an Empire. 4. For an overview of both the connections between science and industry in nine-

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teenth-century Europe, and the literature discussing it, see Hunt, Pursuing Power and Light. 5. The connection between science (including physics) and technology in early twentieth-century America has been well documented, notably in Noble, American by Design. 6. This analysis builds implicitly on the wealth of literature that charts the transformation of the American physics community in the 1920s and the influence of scientific emigration in the 1930s. Representative of the genre are: Weiner, “New Site for the Seminar”; Coben, “Scientific Establishment”; Holton, “Formation”; Hoch, “Reception”; Stuewer, “Nuclear Physicists”; Rider, “Alarm and Opportunity”; Schweber, “Empiricist Temper”; and Assmus, “Americanization of Molecular Physics.” 7. Rowland, “Highest Aim,” 826. A thorough account of Rowland’s professional trajectory and intellectual development can be found in Sweetnam, Command of Light. On Edison as a foil for Rowland, see Hounshell, “Edison and the Pure Science Ideal.” 8. See Kohlstedt, Sokal, and Lewenstein, Establishment of Science. 9. Rowland “Highest Aim,” 833. 10. See Lucier, “Origins of Pure and Applied Science.” 11. For a discussion of best-science elitism and its role in early twentieth-century American physics, see Kevles, Physicists. 12. American Physical Society, “Members. June 15, 1902,” APSM. Six other members listed only an address, placing an upper bound on industrial membership at 6.9 percent. The remainder of members reported academic or government affiliations, and overwhelmingly the former. For a discussion of the rise of American industrial research in this era, see Reich, Making of American Industrial Research. 13. “List of Members of the American Physical Society together with Lists of Officers for 1920 and Past Officers, a Geographical Index, and the Constitution and By-Laws,” July 1920, APSM. The bulk of the remaining members were employed in secondary education, nongovernmental, nonprofit laboratories, such as the Carnegie Institution of Washington, or did not indicate their employment. 14. “List of APS Members,” July 1920, APSM. Maj. George O. Squier of the War Department and George K. Burgess of the Bureau of Standards were elected members of the council, as, it appears was Frank Jewett of the Western Electric Company. The list of council members names “J. B. Jewett,” as an elected member, but Frank, later to become president of Bell Laboratories, is the only Jewett in the APS member roles for 1920. 15. Lucier, “Origins of Pure and Applied Science”; Noble, American by Design. 16. Gooday, “‘Vague and Artificial.’” 17. Huxley, “Science and Practical Life,” 167. 18. Hunt, Maxwellians; Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius. 19. Carty, “Relation of Pure Science,” 512. 20. Coulter, “Role of Science,” 22. 21. Reich, Making of American Industrial Research. 22. Weart, “Physics Business.” 23. See Wise, “Ionists in Industry.” 24. A. Robert, “It Ain’t the Money,” December 2, 1944, KBP, box 10, folder Rabbi [sic], Isidor Isaac. 25. Hyde, “Why 1916?” 26. “Anecdotal History.” 27. “Editorial.”

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28. Waterfall, interview by Lindsay. 29. Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics, Minutes of Meeting held May 3, 1931, AIPM, accessed February 7, 2017, https://www.aip.org/history-programs /niels-bohr-library/collections/governing-board/may-3–1931. 30. “Preliminary Report of the Policy Committee on the Reorganization of Physics,” Addendum to the Minutes of the Joint Meeting of the Executive Committee and Policy Committee, March 8, 1945, AIPS. 31. Pais, “‘Physical Review.’” 32. For a discussion of the growth and function of review literature in the physics community, see Lalli, “New Scientific Journal.” 33. Richtmyer, “Editorial,” 1. 34. I use articles, rather than pages, as a measure of size with the operating assumption that anyone reading the journal would approach each article strategically, and so that reading time would be correlated more closely to number of articles than to number of pages. 35. Quoted in Duncan and Janssen, “On the Verge,” 566. 36. Van Vleck and Nier, “John Torrence Tate,” 471. 37. Tate and Van Vleck, “Editor’s Column,” 69. 38. See Ambrosio, “Historicity of Peirce’s Classification”; Csiszar, “Seriality.” 39. Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 278. 40. See Schweber, “Empiricist Temper.” CHAPTER 2. How Physics Became “What Physicists Do”

Epigraph: Buckley, “What’s in a Name?” 301. 1. A search for articles that include both “radar” in their titles and “physics,” “physicist,” or “physicists” in their text between January 1940 and May 1944, when Buckley spoke, returns only two articles from the New York Times historical archive. One is a brief note reporting Albert Hoyt Taylor’s Medal for Merit citation; the other is a grandiloquent feature entitled “Radar—Our Miracle Ally,” which refers to James Clerk Maxwell as a physicist when setting down the historical background on which the “inventers and engineers” responsible for radar relied. “Two Get Medals for Merit,” New York Times, March 22, 1944; Davis, “Radar.” For an overview of radar’s influence on the Second World War, see Brown, Radar History. 2. Hull, “Outlook for the Physicist,” 66. 3. Kevles, “Cold War,” 263. The quote responds to Paul Forman’s argument that the influx of military spending into physics during the Cold War oriented physics away from basic research. Kevles accuses Forman of being essentialist about physics and taking the academic, pure-science-oriented segment of the discipline as, in some sense, the “true” physics. Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics.” 4. William W. Hansen, letter to Daniel L. Webster, February 4, 1943, FBPS, series 1, box 5, folder 20. 5. Kaiser, “Booms, Busts,” discusses the systemic changes brought about by the rapid post–Second World War population boom in physics. 6. David Kaiser addresses the provenance and significance of this term in “From Blackboard to Bombs.” 7. On the demographics of physics in the 1930s, see Weart, “Physics Business.” 8. Kaiser, “Postwar Suburbanization.” 9. Within discussions that explored the future of the American physics community, representatives of all camps tended to map the academia/industry divide onto the distinc-

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tion between basic and applied research. This mapping assumed, as Morris Muskat, a research physicist at Gulf Research Laboratory, observed, that industrial physicists “are not employed to do physics research per se, but to develop applications of physical principles and techniques. Their specific problems are generally not self-created.” As a consequence, the University of Chicago’s Robert Mulliken noticed, “The academic scientists and the industrial or applied scientists each tend to flock by themselves, because the academic scientists sometimes lack interest in the problems of industry, and the industrial people find the papers presented by the academic scientists too theoretical or too highbrow.” Muskat, “Letter to the Editor,” 38; Mulliken, “Remarks on a Possible Division,” 42. Mulliken was not opposed to a spectroscopy division, but sought ways to encourage it to serve as a center of integration rather than a source of regional identity. 10. Osgood, “Physics in 1943,” 106. The school was renamed Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science in 1955 and dropped the prepositional phrase in 1964. 11. Muskat, “Letter to the Editor,” 38. 12. Harnwell, “Research in Physics.” The article was based on a talk Harnwell delivered at the Symposium on the Role of Physics in the Postwar Period, cohosted by the APS and the American Association of Physics Teachers at State College, Pennsylvania, June 18, 1943. 13. Harnwell, “Research in Physics,” 232–33, 235–36. 14. Harnwell, “More Perfect Union,” 20. 15. At this time, Waterfall was consulting for the US Navy while being paid through Columbia University. Hutchisson, a University of Pittsburgh professor and editor of the Journal of Applied Physics, would later serve as president of the AIP. 16. Waterfall and Hutchisson, “Organization of Physics,” 408–9. 17. The IRE was one of two societies—the American Institute of Electrical Engineers being the other—that combined to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1963. 18. Goldsmith, “Comments,” 649. 19. See Rosenberg, “American Physics.” 20. Saul Dushman et al., “The Present War Is a Physicist’s War,” CRS, folder 3. For further discussion, see chapter 3. 21. Olsen, Crittenden, and Smith, “Letter to the Editor,” 108. 22. Osgood, “Letter to the Editor,” 108. 23. When the AIP’s Governing Board held its first meeting at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC, in May 1931, one articulation of its mission was “to reach a wide audience of men working in physics and to give them easily readable news of all kinds relating to physics.” It consciously aimed to avoid the limitations of the APS and respond to the needs of physicists wherever they might be working, and wherever their interests might take them. Such a mission necessitated a much broader conception of “physicist” than the more conservative voices in the APS would have considered. Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics, Minutes of Meeting held May 3, 1931, AIPM, accessed June 19, 2018, http://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/collections /governing-board/may-3-1931. 24. This address is reprinted in Seitz, “Whither American Physics?” The January 1945 meeting of the APS hosted, and Seitz’s talk was a part of, the first symposium on the solid state discussed in the next section. Darrow, “Symposium on the Solid State.” 25. Seitz, “Whither American Physics?” 40–41.

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26. Seitz, “Whither American Physics?” 41–42. 27. Seitz, “Whither American Physics?” 40. 28. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Pittsburgh, June 21, 1940, APSM. 29. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Baltimore, May 1, 1942, APSM. It is not clear whether Ritchie was a member of the APS at the time he sent this letter, since he had resigned his membership in 1940. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Philadelphia, December 26, 1940, APSM. 30. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Columbia University, June 5, 1943, APSM. 31. Darrow, “Current Trends,” 437–38. 32. Quoted in Darrow, “Current Trends,” 437. 33. Darrow, ironically, was employed by Bell Labs. He joined Western Electric in 1917 and continued on with the advent of the Bell System in 1925. However, he had made a habit of accepting visiting professorships. Darrow spent a year at Stanford in the late 1920s, completed stints at the University of Chicago and Columbia University in the early 1930s, and at the time of these discussions about industry and academia in the early 1940s had been teaching at Smith College, where he spent the spring semesters of 1941 and 1942. 34. As a further example of the force of this policy, a division proposed in 1943 “to be devoted to the promotion of physical principles as applied to textiles, plastics and rubber,” referred to in early council meeting minutes as the “Division of Textile Physics,” was compelled to proceed as the “Division of High-Polymer Physics.” Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Chicago, November 27, 1942, and Minutes of the Meeting Held at Columbia University, June 5, 1943, APSM. 35. Barton, “Institute Doings,” 4. 36. Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics, Minutes of Meeting Held March 10, 1944, AIPM, accessed June 19, 2018, http://www.aip.org/history -programs/niels-bohr-library/collections/governing-board/march-10-1944. 37. “Report of the National Research Council,” 283. 38. Sutton, “Introductory Remarks,” 285. 39. Buckley, “What’s in a Name?” 303. 40. Buckley, “What’s in a Name?” 303. 41. Gibbs, “What Should Be the Method,” 305. 42. Kemble, “What Changes in Graduate Training?” 291. 43. Barnes, “How Can the Place?” 296. 44. Barnes, “How Can the Place?” 300–301. Sawyer was member of the University of Michigan’s physics faculty, but at the time of this meeting, having joined the US Naval Reserve, was directing the experimental laboratories of the Naval Proving Ground. 45. Harnwell, “Role of Organization,” 310–11. 46. Quoted in Harnwell, “Role of Organization,” 312. 47. Harnwell, “Role of Organization,” 313. 48. Darrow, “Conclusion,” 327. 49. The others were Karl T. Compton, Homer L. Dodge, Lee A. DuBridge, and Paul E. Klopsteg. 50. “Preliminary Report of the Policy Committee on the Reorganization of Physics,” Addendum to the Minutes of the Joint Meeting of the Executive Committee and Policy Committee, March 8, 1945, AIPS.

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51. Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics”; Wang, American Science; Weart, Rise of Nuclear Fear. 52. Wildhack, “Letter to the Editor,” 271. 53. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at New York, September 19, 1946, APSM. CHAPTER 3: Balkanizing Physics

Epigraph: This excerpt from “La Marseillaise” translates: “that an impure blood waters our furrows.” The Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC, traditionally hosted the annual American Physical Society meetings. Their informal character encouraged attendees to converse freely on the lawn outside. John H. Van Vleck, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, February 26, 1944, American Physical Society, Division of Solid State Physics, CRS, folder 1. 1. Weart, “Solid Community,” 618. Weart identifies the formation of physics in the mid-nineteenth century as another such critical juncture. 2. Weart, “Birth of the Solid-State Physics Community,” 45. 3. Weart, “Solid Community,” 627, 628, 640. 4. Lyons, “Concerning the Division of High-Polymer Physics.” The Division of Electron and Ion Optics, formed by a group of electron microscopists, had been approved earlier in 1943. 5. Saul Dushman et al., “The Present War Is a Physicist’s War,” CRS, folder 3. Early discussion among the group of six and their correspondents referred to a “section” rather than a “division” of the society. Karl K. Darrow, the APS secretary, corrected this error once the petition came to his attention, noting: “The word . . . is Division and not Section—our Sections are the geographically-defined groups of members such as the New England Section.” Karl Darrow, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, March 22, 1944, CRS, folder 1. The ease with which most physicists interchanged the two terms demonstrates that a lack of familiarity with the internal structure of the APS, in particular with divisions and their goals, remained widespread in the mid-1940s. 6. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to Stanley R. March, July 10, 1947, CRS, folder 4. 7. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to Sidney Siegel, December 17, 1943, CRS, folder 1. 8. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to Conyers Herring, February 15, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 9. John Van Vleck, letter to Saul Dushman, January 29, 1944, CRS, folder 1. Although Smoluchowski was the primary architect of the effort, the letter instructed recipients to reply to whomever among the group of six they preferred. Dushman, the first alphabetically, therefore received the preponderance of the replies, which he dutifully passed on to Smoluchowski. 10. Darrow, “How to Address the APS,” 4. 11. Van Vleck, letter to Dushman, January 29, 1944. Van Vleck, a committed Republican, in personal correspondence of this period often expressed skepticism of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies. His reference to the New Deal may be read as derogatory. 12. See, most notably, Van Vleck, Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities. 13. For a detailed evaluation of the contributions to the quantum revolution that grounded Van Vleck’s standing among his peers, see Duncan and Janssen, “On the Verge.” 14. The two were close enough that Darrow felt comfortable writing Van Vleck in Latin in order to coordinate their nomination of mutual friend Eugene Wigner for fellowship in the American Philosophical Society: “Amor Germanorum, rum cum coca cola,

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et debilitas memoriae sunt radices multorum malorum. Sicut recte dixisti, Wigner non est socius noster in Societate Philosphica Americana” [Love of the Germans, rum and Coca-Cola, and weakness of memory are the roots of many evils. As you have correctly said, Wigner is not our associate in the American Philosophical Society]. Karl Darrow, letter to John Van Vleck, May 15, 1945, KKDP, box 19. (Translation note: Darrow uses the genitive “Germanorum,” which literally translates as “possessed by the Germans.” Given the context—just a week after VE Day—it appears that he would have been better served by the dative “Germanis,” or “for the Germans.”) Van Vleck also had occasion to stay with Darrow while the latter was a visiting professor at Smith College in 1941. After Van Vleck departed, misplacing a pair of suspenders in the process, the two exchanged a series of letters speculating on whether or not suspenders could be had in the Smith colors and whether or not this reflected sartorial trends in women’s colleges. John Van Vleck, letter to Karl Darrow, March 6, 1941; Karl Darrow, letter to Van Vleck, March 13, 1941; and John Van Vleck, letter to Darrow, March 25, 1941, JHVVP, 1853–1981, box 9. 15. John Van Vleck, letter to Karl Darrow, September 19, 1943, KKDP, box 19, folder 1943 TUV. The reference to the real-estate business refers to the Physical Society’s purchase of a building to house its operations in New York City. 16. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to John Van Vleck, February 3, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 17. Van Vleck, letter to Smoluchowski, February 26, 1944. 18. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to John Van Vleck, February 21, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 19. Frederick Seitz, letter to Karl Darrow, May 6, 1944, CRS, folder 1. These opponents of divisionalization included, at the least, Van Vleck and Eugene Wigner, the latter of whom was famously peripatetic in his research interests and would therefore find little to recommend a topically divided APS. 20. Karl Darrow, letter to Frederick Seitz, May 16, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 21. Frederick Seitz, letter to Karl Darrow, May 25, 1944, CRS, folder 1. The apparent malleability of Seitz’s convictions and his adeptness at navigating the competing interests involved carries additional significance in light of his subsequent work on behalf of corporate interests in the face of the scientific consensuses on the dangers of tobacco and anthropogenic climate change. See Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt. 22. Darrow, letter to Seitz, May 16, 1944. 23. Frederick Seitz, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, May 25, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 24. Léon Brillouin, letter to Saul Dushman, January 25, 1944, CRS, folder 1. Brillouin skirted the similar issue that would later dog solid state physics, namely that the border between solids and other states of matter could be similarly fuzzy. 25. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to Sidney Siegel, December 17, 1943, CRS, folder 1. 26. Gaylord P. Harnwell, letter to Gerhard Derge, September 20, 1939, GPHP, box 6, folder 2. Francis Bitter, a physicist hired by MIT’s Department of Mining and Metallurgy in the mid-1930s who took steps to bend the field to a physicist’s notion of rigor, provides another example of the position and aspirations of metallurgy in the late 1930s. By the early 1960s, the study of metals had lost its luster in the face of “a growing trend throughout the world towards the unified treatment of the science of metallic and non-metallic materials.” “Finding a Forum,” 361. 27. National Academy of Sciences, Industrial Research Laboratories, 7th ed. (1946), 34. The inclusion of “solid state physics” was new in the 1946 report, having been absent from 6th edition of 1938. 28. Labs listing solid state physics in 1950 include, in addition to Bell: the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania; the Milwaukee Gas Specialty Company; Philips

NOTES TO PAGES 64–69

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Laboratories, Inc. of Hudson, NY; Westinghouse Electric Corporation (“solid state electronics”), and Carl A. Zapffe’s Laboratory, of Baltimore, MD. National Research Council, Industrial Research Laboratories, 9th ed. (1950). Information for 1956 and 1960 in National Research Council, Industrial Research Laboratories, 10th ed. (1956) and 11th ed. (1960). 29. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to Frederick Seitz, May 30, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 30. Frederick Seitz, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, June 14, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 31. Karl Darrow, “Memorandum of a Conversation with R. Smoluchowski—June 16, 1944,” CRS, folder 1. Darrow indicated in the memo that he had with him a copy of Seitz’s June 14 letter to Smoluchowski, resolving the question of whether or not Smoluchowski had an opportunity to read it before talking the matter over with Darrow. 32. Karl Darrow, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, June 28, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 33. Dushman et al., “Physics of the Solid State.” 34. Dushman et al., “Physics of the Solid State,” 791. 35. John Van Vleck, letter to Frederick Seitz, September 9, 1944, CRS, folder 1. 36. In 1944, Journal of Applied Physics published an approximately equal number of articles from physicists in industry and academia. These two groups together accounted for about 40 percent of contributions each, with the remainder coming from the government sector—mostly concentrated in an issue dedicated to naval research—along with two articles from Soviet researchers. In contrast, during the same year the Physical Review, by then considered the flagship journal of American physics, published eighty-nine articles, six of which, less than 7 percent, came from industrial physicists. Universityaffiliated physicists accounted for seventy-nine of the eighty-nine Physical Review articles, or about 89 percent. 37. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to John Van Vleck, February 13, 1945, CRS, folder 2. 38. John Van Vleck et al., letter to Karl Darrow, January 29, 1945, CRS, folder 2. 39. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to John Van Vleck, March 15, 1945, CRS, folder 2. 40. John Van Vleck, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, March 21, 1945, CRS, folder 2. 41. Frederick Seitz, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, March 30, 1945, CRS, folder 2. 42. Seitz, letter to Smoluchowski, March 30, 1945. 43. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to Thomas Read, Saul Dushman, Sidney Siegel, William Shockley, and Frederick Seitz, December 13, 1946, CRS, folder 4. The committee also included Karl Darrow, George Pegram, and John T. Tate. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at New York, September 19, 1946, APSM. 44. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Minneapolis, November 30, 1946, APSM. 45. Council of the American Physical Society, November 30, 1946. 46. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Washington, May 2, 1947, APSM. 47. Council of the American Physical Society, May 2, 1947. 48. Council of the American Physical Society, May 2, 1947. 49. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Montreal, June 20, 1947, APSM. The Division of High-Polymer Physics had begun with the policy of accepting associate members who were not members of the APS and who paid dues directly to the division. 50. Roman Smoluchowski, letter to the Council of the American Physical Society, September 20, 1946, CRS, folder 4.

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51. Karl K. Darrow, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, December 4, 1946, CRS, folder 4. 52. Karl K. Darrow, “Formation of a Division of Solid State Physics in the American Physical Society,” letter to APS membership, May 1947, CRS, folder 4. 53. Darrow, “Formation of a Division.” 54. Wannier, “Statistical Problem.” 55. Van Vleck, “Survey of the Theory,” 30. On the history of the exchange concept, see Carson, “Peculiar Notion.” 56. Bozorth and Williams, “Effect of Small Stresses.” 57. Zener, “Fracture Stress of Steel.” 58. Breck, “Catalysis.” 59. Bridgman, “Effects of High Hydrostatic Pressure.” 60. Seitz, Modern Theory of Solids. Seitz acknowledged contributions from his physicist wife, Elizabeth Marshall Seitz, that today would likely extend as far as to merit coauthorship. 61. Kittel, Introduction to Solid State Physics. 62. Hopfield, “Whatever Happened?” 3. 63. Dresselhaus, Mildred. 3.42J Theory of Solids, Course Notes of Randall M. Richardson, Fall 1972. Richardson—who I thank for sharing these notes with me—joins others with whom I have spoken in recalling this course as a model of clarity, and one of the highlights of the MIT physics curriculum. 64. Detailed accounts of the transistor’s invention and refinement can be found in Hoddeson, “Discovery of the Point-Contact Transistor,” and Riordan, Hoddeson, and Herring, “Invention of the Transistor.” 65. Kittel, Introduction to Solid State Physics, vii. 66. Arthur von Hippel, “New Fields for Electrical Engineering,” AvHP, box 1, folder 44. CHAPTER 4. The Publication Problem

Epigraph: Alan T. Waterman, letter to Karl K. Darrow, July 5, 1955, Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Chicago, November 25 and 26, 1955, APSM. 1. The total membership was between 230 and 240 in April of 1948, according to an informal assay conducted at the time. Elias Burstein, letter to Karl Darrow, October 19, 1956, APSR, subgroup 2, box 14, folder 11. The APS as a whole reported a membership of 7,649 in 1948. 2. Exact DSSP membership for 1961 is unavailable, but the division had 670 members in 1958 and 951 by 1963. The 5 percent estimate is based on 1958 numbers, the closest date for which both DSSP and APS membership data are available: that year, the DSSP enrolled 670 of the Physical Society’s 13,844 members. DSSP membership numbers from: Sistina F. Greco, letter to Gaile Dody, March 22, 1963, APSR, subgroup 2, box 17, folder 10; Karl Darrow, letter to John C. Slater, February 13, 1958, JCSP, folder Darrow, Karl #3. American Physical Society membership figures from: American Physical Society, “Historical Membership Counts, 1899–2016,” accessed February 20, 2017, http://www.aps.org/membership/statistics/index.cfm. 3. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting at Oak Ridge, March 18, 1950, APSM. The three divisions were the DSSP, the Division of High Polymer Physics, and the Division of Electron Physics, which had changed its name from

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“Electron and Ion Optics” in 1948. To this day, the APS holds two major annual meetings. The March meeting is dominated by solid state–style research, and the April meeting by high energy, nuclear, and astrophysics. 4. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting at Washington, April 29, 1953, APSM. Van Vleck, at this point, was the past president of the APS. Ironically, given his unreserved advocacy of basic research, he had been made Dean of Engineering and Applied Physics at Harvard in 1951. In 1960 he would become chair of the DSSP executive committee. 5. Frederick Seitz, letter to Elias Burstein, January 6, 1961, JHVVP, box 35, folder American Physical Society. 6. Karl Darrow, letter to the Members of the Council of the American Physical Society, January 18, 1960, APSM. 7. Seitz, letter to Burstein, January 6, 1961. 8. Elias Burstein, letter to DSSP Membership, undated 1956, JCSP, folder Burstein, E. 9. A similar strategy was pursued, with more success, in Europe where Physica Status Solidi was first published in 1961. For a summary of this journal’s role in the establishment of European solid state physics, and especially as a mechanism for scientific exchange between East and West during the Cold War, see Hoffmann, “Fifty Years of Physica Status Solidi.” 10. Data collected from the online Physical Review archive at http://prola.aps.org/. The count includes only full articles, omitting letters, minor contributions, errata, and editorial notes. 11. See Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions,” on the boom in physics PhD production. See Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics,” on postwar funding patterns. 12. Barton, “Institute Doings,” 4. 13. Gaylord P. Harnwell, letter to Frederick Seitz, September 29, 1950, PTDR, box 3, folder Se. 14. Katcher, “Editorial,” 3. 15. Weiner, “Physics Today.” 16. The articles referenced are, respectively: Siegel and Sinnott, “El Cerrito Cyclotron”; Gamow, “Reality of Neutrinos”; Tisza, “Helium”; Solomon, “Physics and Cancer”; Jenson, “Pigtails”; Page, “Origin of the Earth”; Iselin, “Down to the Sea.” 17. Gamow, “Any Physics Tomorrow?” 18. 18. Raymond, “Letter to the Editor,” 5. 19. High-minded speculation was becoming common in certain segments of the physics community by the middle of the century. For an account that places them in the context of a longer tradition of such grand theorizing, see Kragh, Higher Speculations. 20. George R. Harrison, letter to Gaylord P. Harnwell, January 20, 1950, GPHP, box 2, folder 22. 21. Sam Goudsmit, letter to Gaylord P. Harnwell, June 29, 1950, GPHP, box 2, folder 22. 22. John H. Van Vleck, letter to Gaylord P. Harnwell, June 27, 1950, GPHP, box 2, folder 22. 23. Robinson, “Challenge of Industrial Physics,” 5. 24. Bush, “Trends in American Science,” 7. 25. Frederick Seitz, letter to William Shockley, February 28, 1945, WSP, box 1, Shockley Correspondence, July 25, 1939–March 30, 1948, Volume I.

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26. Seitz, letter to Shockley, February 28, 1945. 27. “Origin of Radar Countermeasures (Rough Draft),” RRLR, box 4, folder Administrative Report Accumulation. 28. See Forman, “‘Swords into Ploughshares.’” 29. Henry A. Barton, “American Institute of Physics, Director’s Report for 1954,” March 12, 1955, FSP, box 1, folder AIP Correspondence #1. These numbers indicate not only that more people trained as physicists were taking jobs in industry, but also that the definition of “physicist” had broadened to include scientists who might have been otherwise classified in the 1930s or early 1940s. 30. Seitz, On the Frontier, 67. This anecdote is also recounted in Shurkin, Broken Genius, 30–31. 31. For a detailed recounting of Van Vleck’s physical and conceptual peregrinations, see Fellows, “J. H. Van Vleck.” 32. Wigner, Recollections, 171–79. 33. Seitz, On the Frontier, 58–59. Seitz was Wigner’s first American graduate student. His second and third were John Bardeen and Conyers Herring. Bardeen would go on to win two Nobel Prizes for his solid state work and Herring would found the influential theoretical solid state physics division of Bell Labs. 34. See: Assmus, “Americanization of Molecular Physics,” esp. 22; Duncan and Janssen, “On the Verge”; Schweber, “Young John Clarke Slater”; and Gavroglu and Simões, “The Americans, the Germans, and the Beginnings.” 35. Rosenfeld, “Men and Ideas,” 77. 36. John Van Vleck, letter to John Slater, November 17, 1971, JHVVP, box 28, folder 615. 37. Slater, “Quantum Physics in America.” 38. The distinctive sound of the Hungarian accent, combined with the preternatural ability these men showed in science and mathematics, led to the nickname. Hargittai, Martians of Science. 39. Transcript of talk entitled “My Life as a Physicist,” EPWP, box 13, folder 3. 40. Wigner, “On the Mass Defect of Helium.” 41. Slater, interview by Kuhn and Van Vleck. Nevertheless, Slater did publish a follow-up to the BKS paper when he returned to the United States: Slater, “Quantum Theory of Optical Phenomena.” Duncan and Janssen suggest that, despite his consternation with his collaborators in Copenhagen, Slater continued to defend BKS well after Bohr had resigned himself to the reality of light quanta. Duncan and Janssen, “On the Verge.” Slater’s subsequent work on solid state and molecular physics, however, which consisted mostly of conducting ab initio calculations with progressively more powerful digital computers, is consistent with his self-reported disdain for foundational speculation, which was evidently reinforced by his experience abroad. For an overview of the Compton effect, see Stuewer, Compton Effect. 42. Slater, interview by Kuhn and Van Vleck. 43. Wigner and Seitz, “On the Constitution of Metallic Sodium.” 44. More detailed discussion of the development of the electron theory of metals can be found in: Hoddeson and Baym, “Development of the . . . Theory of Metals”; Eckert, “Propaganda in Science”; and Joas and Katzir, “Analogy, Extension, and Novelty.” 45. The Wigner–Seitz method begins with the lattice structure of a metal and defines a cell by bisecting the lines between any given lattice point and its nearest neighbor. The

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points inside the polyhedron defined in this way are closer to that lattice point than any other and a set of these polyhedrons packs to fill the entire lattice. For solids with highly symmetrical lattice structures, each of these cells may be approximated by a sphere, allowing Schrödinger’s equation for a solid to be solved relatively simply. Such cells, rendered in reciprocal space, persist under the familiar moniker “Brillouin zones,” as a nod to his foundational work, Brillouin, Die Quantenstatistik. See also Hoch, “Development of the Band Theory,” which also contains a more detailed exposition of the technical features of the Wigner–Seitz method. 46. Seitz, Modern Theory of Solids. 47. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at New York, January 29, 1948, APSM. 48. Council of the American Physical Society,
Minutes of the Meeting Held at Washington, April 29, 1953, APSM. 49. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Washington, April 27, 1955, APSM. A discussion of the economics of physics publishing in this era, with an emphasis on page charges, can be found in Scheiding, “Paying for Knowledge.” 50. Barton, “Director’s Report for 1954.” 51. Frederick Seitz, letter to Henry A. Barton, November 3, 1954, FSP, box 1, folder AIP Correspondence #1. 52. Alan T. Waterman, letter to Karl K. Darrow, July 5, 1955, APSM. 53. The distribution list of the letter is not available, but the committee proposed contacting “leading solid state physicists and chemical physicists,” naming as representative of this group: “[LeRoy] Akper, [John] Bardeen, [Harvey] Brooks, [Conyers] Herring, [Charles] Kittel, [Andrew W.] Lawson, [Humboldt] Levernz, [Gordon] McKay, [Frederick] Seitz, [William] Shockley, [John C.] Slater, Smith, C. S. [Cyril Stanley], [Arthur H.] Snell, [John] Van Vleck, [Eugene] Wigner.” “Recommendations of the AIP-APS Committee on Joint Publication Problems with Regard to the Journal of Chemical Physics,” FSP, box 1, folder AIP Correspondence #1. 54. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Chicago, November 25 and 26, 1949, APSM. 55. The Journal of Chemical Physics was predominantly a chemical journal despite its membership in the AIP family of publications. Of the papers it published, 65 percent originated in chemistry departments. “Recommendations of the AIP-APS Committee on Joint Publication Problems with Regard to the Journal of Chemical Physics,” FSP, box 1, folder AIP Correspondence #1. 56. An illustration: in 1967 Robert Parr, then based at Johns Hopkins, who was deeply involved with promoting chemical physics in both the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society (ACS), observed: “Inspection of the pages of the Journal of Chemical Physics shows that some chemical physicists are professional chemists, some are professional physicists. (For example, thirty-two of the papers in the April 1, 1967, issue of Journal of Chemical Physics are by authors clearly identifiable as chemists, nine by authors clearly identifiable as physicists and twenty-nine by authors not clearly identifiable as one or the other.) The subject is truly interdisciplinary, although more chemists go into it than do physicists.” Oral Report to the Physical Sciences Group on May 19, 1967, RGPP, box 131, folder Chemical Physics program. By 1967, approximately 40 percent of the members of the ACS’s Division of Physical Chemistry were also members of the

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APS. Herbert S. Gutowsky, letter to ACS membership, October 11, 1967, AIPK, folder 64:24. 57. Frederick Seitz, letter to select solid state and chemical physicists, June 1, 1955, FSP, box 1, folder AIP—Correspondence #1. 58. The twenty-two responses preserved in the Seitz papers break down as follows: of the solid state physicists responding, thirteen opposed the proposal, two favored it, and three reported no strong opinion. All three chemical physicists responding were in favor. One additional favorable vote came from a self-identified “other.” The final tally of these reports: six in favor, thirteen opposed, three with no strong opinion. 59. Harvey Brooks, letter to Frederick Seitz, June 23, 1955, FSP, box 2, folder AIP— Reorganization of Journals. 60. William Shockley, completed survey: “Opinion of the Recommendations Concerning the Journal of Chemical Physics,” received June 16, 1955, FSP, box 2, folder AIP—Reorganization of Journals. 61. George E. Pake, completed survey: “Opinion of the Recommendations Concerning the Journal of Chemical Physics,” FSP, box 2, folder AIP—Reorganization of Journals. Pake’s resistance to the term “solid state” is notable. Pake’s research and education were representative of self-identified solid state physicists at the time; he had taken a PhD at Harvard with Edward Mills Purcell and published extensively on nuclear magnetic resonance and paramagnetism. His avoidance of the term, and his use of an uncommon alternative, “structure of matter physics,” reflect discomfort with “solid state” among portions of the community. 62. Walter Kohn, completed survey: “Opinion of the Recommendations Concerning the Journal of Chemical Physics,” FSP, box 2, folder AIP—Reorganization of Journals. 63. Mody, Instrumental Community. 64. It is therefore a lovely irony that Kohn would win the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with John Pople. Kohn was cited for his role in developing density functional theory (DFT), which had broad relevance for both solid state and chemical problems. On Kohn and DFT, see Zangwill, “Education of Walter Kohn” and “Hartree and Thomas.” On the importance of instrumental practice for early nuclear magnetic resonance researchers, see Lenoir and Lécuyer, “Instrument Makers.” 65. Hillard B. Huntington, completed survey: “Opinion of the Recommendations Concerning the Journal of Chemical Physics,” FSP, box 2, folder AIP—Reorganization of Journals. 66. Conyers Herring, completed survey: “Opinion of the Recommendations Concerning the Journal of Chemical Physics,” FSP, box 2, folder AIP—Reorganization of Journals. 67. Shirley L. Quimby, completed survey: “Opinion of the Recommendations Concerning the Journal of Chemical Physics,” FSP, box 2, folder AIP—Reorganization of Journals. 68. Weart, “Solid Community,” 652. 69. See Gavroglu and Simões, Neither Physics nor Chemistry. 70. Harvey Brooks, “Memorandum Concerning the Scope and Aims of the International Journal of the Physics and Chemistry of Solids,” February 1956, FSP, box 11, folder Harvey Brooks. 71. Brooks, “Foreword,” 1. 72. Harvey Brooks, letter to Frederick Seitz, November 15, 1955, FSP, box 11, folder Harvey Brooks.

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73. Frederick Seitz, letter to Harvey Brooks, November 19, 1955, FSP, box 11, folder Harvey Brooks. 74. Council of the American Physical Society, Part of Preliminary Agenda for January 29, 1957, APSM. The statesman in question was President Grover Cleveland. Safire, “Penumbra of Desuetude.” 75. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at New York, January 26, 1960, APSM. 76. Section A was devoted to atomic, molecular, and optical physics, C to nuclear physics, and D to particle and astrophysics. CHAPTER 5. Big Solid State Physics at the National Magnet Laboratory

Epigraph: Benjamin Lax, letter to Leland Haworth, May 10, 1967, NMLR. 1. Rush, “US Neutron Facility.” 2. Crease, “National Synchrotron Light Source.” 3. Crease and Westfall, “New Big Science.” 4. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Chicago, November 25 and 26, 1955, APSM. These conferences continue through to the present. 5. For an overview of how big science has been used as a historiographical category, see Capshew and Rader, “Big Science.” The limitations of the big science framework are explored in Westfall, “Rethinking Big Science.” 6. As of 1969, the AEC accounted for upward of 90 percent of funding for US high energy physics, with contributions to the tune of 6 percent from the NSF and about 1 percent from both the DOD and NASA. AEC Authorizing Legislation, Fiscal Year 1970: Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 91st Cong. 86 (April 17 and 18, 1969). 7. Bitter, Magnets, 55. Since Abraham’s textbook was not available in English translation at the time, Bitter most likely refers to the 1923 German edition: Abraham and Föppl, Theorie der Elektrizität. The English translation appeared in 1937 as Abraham, Classical Theory. 8. Bitter enjoyed excellent placement and better timing. Caltech was a leading site of cosmic ray research in the late 1920s while Bitter was a postdoc there. His stint at Westinghouse overlapped with one of the lab’s most productive periods of magnetron research, which fed directly into radar work during the Second World War. Bitter also arrived at the Cavendish immediately after Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron and the accompanying boom in atomic theory. See: Xu and Brown, “Early History of Cosmic Ray Research”; Stephan, “Experts at Play”; and Brown, Neutron and the Bomb. Ferromagnetism research in the 1930s was particularly lively, and pointed to questions of foundational importance for the subsequent development of solid state physics. See Keith and Quédec, “Magnetism.” 9. Francis Bitter, “Abstract of the Present State and Possible Developments in Physical Metallurgy,” ca. 1939, FBP, box 5, folder MIT Magnet Lab. 10. Bitter, “Abstract of the Present State.” 11. Bitter, “Abstract of the Present State.” The appellation “fundamental” was commonly employed permissively around this time. Bitter was in accordance with the accepted usage by suggesting that sciences other than physics could be fundamental. Frederick Seitz, writing just a few years later, identified “fundamental” with “pure” research, defining it as that “which has intrinsic value as a form of culture.” He further mirrored elements of Bitter’s definition by suggesting that “physics serves as a source of fundamen-

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tal knowledge for a majority of the most important fields of engineering.” Seitz, “Whither American Physics?” 40. Vannevar Bush asked rhetorically in the inaugural issue of Physics Today, “Who would have expected, looking forward from, say, 1939, to find the United States Navy vigorously furthering a program in fundamental science, including nucleonics, genetics, and mathematics?” Bush, “Trends in American Science,” 6. Clarke, “Pure Science,” demonstrates that “fundamental research” took on a range of meanings in the first half of the twentieth century that did not obey the basic/applied distinction. For further discussion, see Martin, “Fundamental Disputations.” 12. “Proposal for a High Field Magnet Laboratory,” September 8, 1958, NMLR, box 1, folder 55. 13. Bitter took a leave of absence from MIT to work on degaussing naval ships during the Second World War. During this time, his metallurgical magnetism laboratory was dismantled and its resources redistributed to war work. On his return to MIT at the end of the war, both he and the administration thought it more appropriate to reassemble the magnetism program under the auspices of the physics department. 14. Francis Bitter, “Dedication of the National Magnet Laboratory,” April 30, 1963, FBP, box 5, folder NML Dedication Notes. 15. The extent to which it was possible in practice for an installation such as the NML to be truly devoted to basic research while operating on military funding is a matter of some debate. See: Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics”; Leslie, Cold War; Bromberg, “Device Physics”; and Wilson, “Consultants.” Forman and Leslie argue that military interest diverted—or at least inclined—Cold War solid state research away from fundamental work. In contrast, Bromberg and Wilson argue that applied military research coexisted, and indeed interacted constructively, with fundamental theoretical work. I do not take a position on this debate here. Though I am sympathetic to the case Bromberg and Wilson advance, it is enough here that a desire to pursue basic research manifested itself in the laboratory’s goals and operations. 16. National Magnet Laboratory promotional brochure, 1963, FBP, box 5, folder NML Dedication Notes. 17. “Visiting Scientists and Students,” 1965, NMLR, box 2, folder 17. 18. John C. Slater, letter to Julius A. Stratton, August 8, 1958, FBP box 3, folder High Field Magnet Facility, No. 1 of 3. 19. “The National Magnet Laboratory and the Technology of the Future,” February 20, 1963, NMLR, box 3. 20. Benjamin Lax to Roman Smoluchowski, March 10, 1965, NMLR, box 3, folder 25. 21. “NML Publications Record,” December 31, 1965, NMLR, box 2, 17. From 1963 to 1965, staff increased from thirty-two to thirty-eight. 22. The remainder were spread over the Journal of Applied Physics (8), Review of Scientific Instruments (4), Applied Physics Letters (2), and one each in the Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Physics of Fluids, and Physics Today. 23. Benjamin Lax, letter to Roman Smoluchowski, March 10, 1965, JCSP, folder National Academy of Science-National Research Council, Solid State Sciences Panel. 24. Benjamin Lax, letter to George H. Vineyard, March 17, 1967, NMLR, box 2, folder 18. 25. Lloyd A. Wood, letter to Benjamin Lax, April 19, 1967, NMLR, box 2, folder 18. 26. Lax, letter to Vineyard, March 17, 1967. 27. Lax, letter to the Subcommittee on Science, Research and Development of the

NOTES TO PAGES 111–119

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Committee on Science and Astronautics, March 5, 1971, NMLR, box 2, folder 4. Lax did use “coupling” language here, but was careful to write that the results of basic research could be coupled with applied questions, rather than with the planning, execution, or funding of the research. 28. “Report of the Advisory Committee of the National Magnet Laboratory,” February 1966, NMLR, box 2, folder 17. 29. “Report of the Advisory Committee of the National Magnet Laboratory,” April 1967, NMLR, box 2, folder 18. 30. AEC Authorizing Legislation, 89. 31. Benjamin Lax, letter to Nicolaas Bloembergen, May 10, 1967, NMLR, box 2, folder 18. In 1967 the Division of Solid State Physics had 1,193 members, compared to 762 in the Division of Nuclear Physics, the next-largest division. The Division of Particles and Fields held its inaugural meeting in January 1968 with a charter membership of 551. W. V. Smith to Division of Solid State Physics Members, January 6, 1967, JCSP, folder American Philosophical Society, #5; “Proceedings of the American Physical Society Meeting #425,” 1967, APSM; M. Davis to Chairmen and Secretary-Treasurers of APS Divisions, February 15, 1968, APSR, subgroup 2, box 17, folder 10. 32. Lax, letter to Haworth, May 10, 1967. 33. AEC Authorizing Legislation, 106–7. 34. “Publications of the Francis Bitter National Laboratory in 1968,” NMLR, box 2, folder 20. In 1965, by contrast, the number of publications in the latter two journals more than doubled those in the former. 35. “Meeting of the Advisory Committee,” April 1969, NMLR, box 2, folder 20. 36. Henry Kolm, letter to Benjamin Lax, June 2, 1973, NMLR, box 2, folder 32. The bad blood between the two persisted, to the extent that Kolm was moved to paint a deeply unflattering portrait of Lax on his autobiographical website. “MIT Magnet Lab (1961–1982),” accessed May 24, 2015, http://henrykolm.weebly.com/mit-magnetic -lab-1961–82.html. The page is now down, but can be viewed at https://web.archive.org /web/20161103214555/http://henrykolm.weebly.com/mit-magnetic-lab-1961–82.html. 37. See Kevles, Physicists, esp. 420–21, and Asner, “Linear Model.” 38. Stanford Accelerator Power Supply: Hearing Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 88th Cong. 23 (January 29, 1964) (statement of Dr. W. K. H. Panofsky, Director, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). 39. AEC Authorizing Legislation, 113. 40. AEC Authorizing Legislation, 118. 41. AEC Authorizing Legislation, 111–12. 42. AEC Authorizing Legislation, 116. 43. AEC Authorizing Legislation, 115. 44. Stevens, “Fundamental Physics,” 175. CHAPTER 6. Solid State and Materials Science

Epigraph: Arthur von Hippel, text of a lecture given at Brown University, July 20, 1969, AvHP, box 5. 1. “Petition to the Council of the American Physical Society to Request the Formation of a New Division on the Problems of Physics and Society,” Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at New York, February 5, 1969, APSM. The committee was originally proposed as a division, but the council deemed that its

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scope was too broad and that a division would limit participation. It instead recommended a committee and approved a measure that would allow APS membership dues to pay for committee members’ travel to relevant meetings. The committee was a precursor to the Forum on Physics and Society, the history of which is addressed in more detail in Bridger, Scientists at War. 2. Albert M. Clogston, “The American Physical Society and the Economic Concerns of American Physicists,” March 10, 1970, in American Physical Society Council, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Washington, DC, April 26, 1970, APSM. 3. Sherwin and Isenson, First Interim Report, 13. 4. For detailed treatments, see Bensaude-Vincent, “Construction of a Discipline” and “Concept of Materials.” 5. National Academy of Sciences, Report, 1953–54, 60. 6. National Academy of Sciences, Report, 1957–58, 46. 7. Materials Advisory Board, “Standing Review of Department of Defense Materials Research and Development Program,” FSP, box 1, folder Air Research and Development Command, 1952–61 #1. 8. Materials Advisory Board, “Standing Review.” 9. National Academy of Sciences, More Effective Organization, frontmatter. 10. National Academy of Sciences, More Effective Organization, vii. 11. Van Vlack, Elements of Materials Science, vii. 12. The agency was sinusoidally forthright about its emphasis on military research; its name vacillated between ARPA and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). To avoid confusion, I refer to it as ARPA throughout. It was founded as ARPA in 1958, changed its name to DARPA in 1972, dropped the “D” in 1993, and restored it in 1996. 13. “Interdisciplinary Laboratories for Basic Research in Materials Sciences,” JCSP, folder MIT. Dept. of Physics #39. 14. National Academy of Sciences, Advancing Materials Research, 36. 15. Mody and Choi, “From Materials Science to Nanotechnology.” 16. See Schweber, “Empiricist Temper,” on the American style of theory that grew largely from the school Kemble established. 17. Dresselhaus, interview by Martin, and 3.42J Theory of Solids, Course Notes of Randall M. Richardson, Fall 1972. 18. John C. Slater, letter to John Kincaid, May 6, 1959, JCSP, folder Kincaid, John F. #1. 19. “The Interdisciplinary Nature of M.I.T. Research,” JCSP, folder Proposal for a Materials Center at M.I.T., 1960. 20. Arthur von Hippel, who established the Laboratory for Insulation Research, recalled choosing an abstruse name as “a camouflage trick . . . to avoid stepping on sensitive toes by encroaching on the entrenched interests of physicists, chemists, and metallurgists in the materials field.” Arthur von Hippel, interview by Z. Malek, September 1969, AvHP, box 1, folder 16. 21. Slater, letter to Kincaid, May 6, 1959. 22. John C. Slater, untitled memorandum, JCSP, folder M.I.T. Dept. of Physics #10. 23. Arthur von Hippel, “New Fields for Electrical Engineering,” AvHP, box 1, folder 44. This was a piece von Hippel prepared for the April 1942 edition of The Tech Engineering News, a periodical published by MIT undergraduates.

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24. “Proposal for an Expanded Program of Materials Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 12, 1956,” JCSP, folder MIT Materials Research #1. The AEC made a similar push within the national laboratories, as discussed in Westwick, National Labs, 257–58. 25. “Materials Research Program (ca. 1956),” JCSP, folder MIT. Materials Research #1. 26. Slater, letter to Kincaid, May 6, 1959. 27. John C. Slater, letter to John Kincaid, April 30, 1959, JCSP, folder Kincaid, John F. #1. 28. John C. Slater, “On the MIT Materials Center,” ca. 1960, JCSP, folder Slater, J. C. On the MIT Materials Center. 29. Knowles and Leslie, “‘Industrial Versailles,’” argue that the campuses at industrial laboratories such as Bell, General Motors, and IBM mimicked what the architect Eero Saarinen supposed to be the university model of organizing research, namely a linear model, in which basic research preceded industrial applications. The rhetoric around MIT’s IDL reveals similar goals by suggesting that placing basic research in physics and chemistry alongside materials engineering fields would help to advance ARPA’s technical aims. 30. ARPA, “Administrative Memo #1,” July 20, 1962, JCSP, folder MIT. Dept. of Physics #138. 31. Weaire, Solid State Science, x. 32. The earliest use I have found is from 1979, when the computer scientist Gerald Weinberg attributed the quip to mathematician Frank Harary. Weinberg, Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 25. 33. Melvin Calvin, letter to Philip Handler, December 1975, in COSMAT, Materials and Man’s Needs: Summary Report, v. 34. Smith, “Matter versus Materials.” 35. COSMAT, Materials and Man’s Needs, 2:307. 36. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Chicago, November 25 and 26, 1949, APSM. 37. American Physical Society Executive Committee, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Flat Rock, NC, June 18–20, 1990, APSM. 38. “Statement of the Council of the American Physical Society,” April 28, 1970, in American Physical Society Council, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Washington, DC, April 26, 1970, APSM. 39. The charter societies included the American Ceramic Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Society of Metals, the American Society of Non-Destructive Testing, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, the Society of Plastics Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Metallurgical Society of AIME. The APS would eventually join the federation in 1995. 40. Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at Chicago, February 3, 1974, APSM. 41. “APS Ad Hoc Committee on Applied Physics,” in Council of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Meeting Held at New York, October 25, 1974, APSM. 42. COSMAT, Materials and Man’s Needs: Summary Report, 140. 43. Groenewegen and Peters, “Emergence and Change.”

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CHAPTER 7. Responses to the Reductionist Worldview

Epigraph: Yang et al., “High-Energy Physics,” 52–53. 1. Stanford Accelerator Power Supply: Hearing Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 88th Cong. 23 (January 29, 1964) (statement of Dr. W. K. H Panofsky, Director, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). 2. Livingstone, Particle Physics, 6–7. For detailed historical background, see Heilbron and Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory. 3. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union, in a microcosm of the arms race and the space race, competed to build higher-energy accelerators, providing an additional incentive for the US particle physics community to pursue the energy frontier over the intensity frontier. See also Seidel, “Accelerating Science.” 4. See Stevens, “Fundamental Physics.” 5. Boyer, University of Chicago, esp. ch. 4. 6. Weinberg, First Nuclear Era, 3. 7. Weinberg, “Criteria for Scientific Choice,” Minerva; Weinberg, “Criteria for Scientific Choice,” Physics Today, 45. 8. Weinberg, “Criteria for Scientific Choice,” Physics Today, 45. 9. Weinberg, “Criteria for Scientific Choice,” Physics Today, 47. 10. Yang et al., “High-Energy Physics,” 52, 57. 11. Yang et al., “High-Energy Physics,” 55. 12. Weisskopf and Weinberg, “Two Open Letters,” 47. The quark model was proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964 but did not gain experimental traction until 1967, so Weisskopf ’s identification of nucleons as the basis for all matter is, in content and rhetoric, equivalent to later claims of the same status for the standard model and its imagined successors. 13. Weisskopf, “Nuclear Structure,” 24. 14. The assumption that general principles are worked out in one realm before being applied in another is also prominent within the history of physics. It has contributed to the impression that solid state physics was a field devoted to mere applications of more fundamental work. This assumption is challenged in James and Joas, “Subsequent and Subsidiary?” James and Joas argue that so-called applications of early quantum mechanics made many essential contributions to the foundations of the theory. 15. Hoddeson, “Roots of Solid-State Research,” describes the process by which a basic research ethos took root at Bell Labs and chronicles how the establishment of solid state research in this context led to the laissez-faire approach distinctive to the major American industrial laboratories of the time. 16. Stefan Machlup, letter to William Shockley, May 30, 1955, WSP, box 2, folder Correspondence 1954 and 1955. 17. On the role of the transistor and integrated circuit in reshaping the American research landscape, see Mody, Long Arm of Moore’s Law. 18. Numbers obtained by searching for each institution’s full name, in quotes, within the “Affiliation” field in the APS journals database at https://journals.aps.org/search, accessed December 21, 2017. 19. Anderson, interview by Kojevnikov. 20. “The Nobel Prize in Physics 1977,” Nobelprize.org, accessed January 7, 2011, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1977/.

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21. Anderson, “More Is Different—One More Time.” 22. National Academy of Sciences, “Members,” accessed January 4, 2018, http:// www.nasonline.org/member-directory/?referrer=http://nas.nasonline.org/site/Dir /1742171349?pg=srch&view=basic. Data taken from both current and deceased member rolls. The National Academy of Sciences database does not indicate deceased members’ sections. They were counted only if they could be identified as unambiguous examples of solid state, nuclear, or particle physicists. 23. Anderson, “More Is Different,” 393. 24. National Academy of Sciences, Physics in Perspective, 129, 453. Tables I.6 and IV.1 of this report show $211.7 million in total expenditure for particle physics versus $56 million for basic condensed matter research. 25. Untitled document, APSR, subgroup 2, box 17, folder 10. Data taken from numbers collected following a 1968 membership drive. 26. Anderson, “More Is Different,” 393. 27. Anderson, “More Is Different,” 393. 28. Gordon, Zeiger, and Townes, “Maser.” 29. See Roberts, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, 74–76. 30. Anderson, “More Is Different,” 394. 31. Anderson, “More Is Different,” 396. This argument has parallels familiar to philosophers of biology; it is a common antireductionist argument that biological processes do not make sense in terms of genes alone, and that reference to the organismal level, at least, is required to explain phenomena such as differential fitness. This position is astutely summarized by the humorist Douglas Adams, who observes: “If you try to take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.” Adams, Salmon of Doubt, 135–36. 32. Anderson, “One More Time,” 1. 33. Anderson, “One More Time,” 4. See also Schmalian, “Failed Theories of Superconductivity.” 34. Anderson, interview by Kojevnikov. 35. Pippard, “Cat and the Cream,” 40–41. 36. Anderson, interview by Kojevnikov. 37. Cat, “Physicists’ Debates on Unification,” makes a similar observation when assessing Anderson’s position in terms of the unity of physics. Anderson, according to Cat, saw physics as methodologically (rather than ontologically) unified. If physics could be unified by methodology, rather than by the reduction to a single set of laws and concepts, then fundamental physical knowledge need not be restricted to the lowest level of complexity. 38. Cat’s analysis of Anderson’s position in terms of methodological unity is useful when considering the relationship between physics and other sciences. By avoiding strong claims about the ultimate nature of reality, Anderson shifted the focus to methodology as a basis by which physics could be at once internally unified and delineated from other sciences. Cat, “Physicists’ Debates on Unification,” 99. 39. Anderson, More and Different, 135. 40. “2 From U.S. Among 4 Nobel Science Winners,” New York Times, October 12, 1977. 41. Sullivan, “Physics Prize,” 1. 42. Browne, “Nobel Prizes Are Awarded,” 1.

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CHAPTER 8. Becoming Condensed Matter Physics

Epigraph: Gray, “New AIP Handbook,” 41. 1. Gray and Billings, American Institute of Physics Handbook. 2. Gray, “New AIP Handbook,” 41. 3. Proctor, “‘-Logos,’ ‘-Ismos,’ and ‘-Ikos,’” 292. 4. Anderson, More and Different, 90. 5. Kragh, Quantum Generations, 366. Kragh has more recently made his own observations about the importance of names in “Naming the Big Bang.” 6. Kohn, “Essay on Condensed Matter Physics.” 7. Volker Heine, “History,” Theory of Condensed Matter, University of Cambridge, accessed December 19, 2017, http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/about/history/. 8. Weart, “Solid Community,” 651. 9. Quoted in Chicago Tribune, “Yanks Sweep Science Field.” For further discussion, see Martin, “Prestige Asymmetry.” 10. As in Ferrell, Lee, and Pal, “Magnetic Quenching.” 11. Pierre Teissier notes that in 1971, when American physicists were just beginning to use “condensed matter” to describe their own activities, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes had already named his chair at the Collège de France the “Physics of Condensed Matter” chair. Teissier, “Solid-State Chemistry,” 251. 12. “Important Announcement.” This was not a full-scale fission of the journal, since it did not yet allow separate subscriptions to each section, but rather a topical grouping within what was still a single journal. A full-scale split would come several years later in 1970. 13. For example, Guyon et al., “Tunneling into Dirty Superconductors”; Coon and Fiske, “Josephson ac”; and McFadden, Tahir-Kheli, and Taggart, “Space-TimeDependent Correlation,” 854. 14. In 1975, this journal was absorbed into Zeitschrift für Physik when the latter split into two sections, the second of which was devoted to condensed matter and general physics. 15. Physik der Kondensierten Materie 1, no. 2 (1963), frontmatter. 16. Hoffmann, “Fifty Years of Physica Status Solidi.” A general term spanning physical, chemical, biological research, “festkörperforschung” (solid state research), had been in circulation since the late 1940s as the name of an institute within the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin. Auth, “Das Institut für Festköperphysik,” 27. 17. Höhler, Lyons, and Niekisch, Arbeitstagung Festkörperphysik. Among the participants was Karl Wolfgang Böer, who would found the journal Physica Status Solidi in the early 1960s shortly before immigrating to the United States to assume a post at the University of Delaware. 18. Pick, “Festkörperphysik.” This is also the year in which the term first appeared in Annalen der Physik. 19. “Bei der Aufzählung der großen Arbeitsgebiete der neueren physikalischen Forschung trifft man immer häufiger auf den Begriff Festkörperphysik.” Pick, “Festkörperphysik,” 346. 20. “Man ist geneigt, ein solches Wort als Überschrift für ein klar umrissenes, einheitliches Arbeitsgebiet zu nehmen. Bei genauerem Zusehen findet sich diese Hoffnung zunächst aber ganz und gar nicht bestätigt.” Pick, “Festkörperphysik,” 346. 21. Teissier, “Solid-State Chemistry.”

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22. “les deux approximations fondamentales de la physique du solide et de la chimie.” Friedel, “Sur L’origine du Ferromagnétisme,” 829. 23. Friedel, interview by Aribart and Bensaude-Vincent. International contacts are common among early adopters of the term. Russian-born French physicist Lew Kowarski, who established strong ties with British physicists during the war, produced a UNESCO report in 1955 that identified “physique de l’état solide” as an area relevant to a prospective nuclear research facility. Kowarski, “Les Piles de Recherches.” 24. Mott, “Mechanism of Work-Hardening,” 413. For a detailed treatment of the development of Mott’s research school, see Keith and Hoch, “Formation of a Research School.” 25. Between 1945 and 1965, papers with at least one author bearing a UK affiliation (“United Kingdom,” “Great Britain,” “England,” “Scotland,” “Wales,” or “Northern Ireland”) appeared 989 times in American Physical Society journals, versus 121 results from Germany and 258 from France. Data from the APS journal database at journals.aps.org. 26. “Forthcoming Events,” 420. 27. “Important Announcement,” 1. 28. It is plausible that the term was in the air at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where managing editors Samuel Goudsmit and Simon Pasternack were based. Brookhaven’s accelerator program provided the opportunity for them to be exposed both to the technical term and, through communication and collaboration with international labs, most notably CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), to the newly common European usage. Brookhaven’s collaborative efforts are outlined in Crease, Making Physics. 29. National Academy of Sciences, Physics: Survey and Outlook, 67. The BCS theory of superconductivity was a major triumph for solid state physics and drew a great many talented theoreticians into the field. It was published in 1957: Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer, “Theory of Superconductivity.” 30. “NAS-NRC Physics Survey Committee, Solid State Physics and Condensed Matter,” draft, April 1964, HBP, series HUGFP 128.13, box 1, folder NAS Survey Committee March–April 1964. The footnote was cut from the Pake report but would resurface in a supplement that furnished more detailed reports on the subfields of physics. National Academy of Sciences, Physics: Survey and Outlook, 143. 31. National Academy of Sciences, Physics: Survey and Outlook, 67. 32. National Academy of Sciences, Physics: Survey and Outlook, 68. 33. National Academy of Sciences, Physics: Survey and Outlook, 67–69. 34. Pippard, “Cat and the Cream,” 40–41. 35. See Weisel, “Plasma Archipelago.” 36. National Academy of Sciences, Physics: Survey and Outlook, 69. 37. National Academy of Sciences, Physics: Survey and Outlook. 38. National Academy of Sciences, Physics in Perspective. 39. Physik der kondensierten Materie 1, no. 1 (1963), frontmatter; “Authors,” 361. 40. National Academy of Sciences, Physics in Perspective, 460. 41. National Academy of Sciences, Physics in Perspective, 458. 42. National Academy of Sciences, Physics in Perspective, 459. 43. Anderson, “More Is Different” 393. 44. Common lore holds that Anderson and Volker Heine coined “condensed matter” in 1967 while Anderson held a seasonal professorship at the University of Cambridge and they changed the name of the solid state theory group at the Cavendish Laboratory

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to “theory of condensed matter.” Earlier occurrences of the term, in particular in the Springer journal title, belie this simple origin story, but the adoption of the term by a major UK research unit no doubt raised its profile in the Anglophone world. 45. American Physical Society Journals, accessed August 13, 2014, http://journals .aps.org/search. The ratio is starker in AIP journals, with 33 instances of “condensed matter” and 4,695 of “solid state.” The difference here is amplified by several factors, including the applied focus of AIP journals during an era that witnessed an explosion in topics such as solid state masers and lasers and the fact that the AIP search algorithm includes the titles of citing articles, which generates a high rate of false positives. American Institute of Physics Journals, accessed August 13, 2014, http://scitation.aip.org/search. 46. Minutes of the American Physical Society Council Meeting, San Francisco, California, January 22, 1978, APSM. 47. Minutes of the American Physical Society Council Meeting, Washington, DC, April 23, 1978, APSM. 48. Hopfield, “Whatever Happened?” points to the success of the BCS theory of superconductivity as the theoretical development that encouraged physicists to see solid state problems as general physical problems. 49. National Academy of Sciences, Industrial Research Laboratories, 7th ed. (1946). 50. National Academy of Sciences, Industrial Research Laboratories, 11th ed. (1960). 51. Walter Kohn, letter to George Pake, November 13, 1964, HPB, series HUGFP 128.13, box 1, folder NAS Survey Committee May–December 1964. 52. Harvey Brooks, letter to Walter Kohn, March 30, 1964, HBP, series HUGFP 128.13, box 1, folder NAS Survey Committee March–April 1964. 53. Brown, “AT&T and the Consent Decree.” 54. See Mody, Long Arm of Moore’s Law. 55. Turner, “Aspen Physics Turns 50.” 56. Electron density is itself represented by a function, hence the name density functional theory, a functional being a function of a function. For more on Kohn and the development and dissemination of DFT, see Zangwill “Education of Walter Kohn” and “Half Century.” 57. Kohn and Sham, “Self-Consistent Equations.” For further discussion of this point, see Zangwill, “Half Century.” As of January 1, 2018, journals.aip.org records 26,273 citations to the paper. Google Scholar, which crawls a wider array of sources, records 46,560. 58. A firsthand account of the origins of Santa Fe Institute is available in Cowan, Manhattan Project, chs. 36–38. 59. Domb, “Critical Phenomena.” 60. “Battille Colloquium, Critical Phenomena: Final Program, Extended Abstracts, and Agenda Discussion,” LKP, box 1, folder Battille Colloquium on Critical Phenomena, Program and Abstracts, 1970. 61. University of Chicago press release, August 9, 1945, HAR, box 116, folder 4. 62. Andrew W. Lawson, “The Institute for the Study of Metals after One Decade,” December 26, 1957, CSSP, box 2, folder 31. 63. Edward H. Levi, memo to Committee on the Budget, April 10, 1967, BAR, box 146, folder 2. 64. Sloan, “Molecularizing Chicago.” 65. Ole Kleppa, letter to Albert V. Crewe, May 23, 1974, LAR, box 173, folder 6.

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66. National Academy of Sciences, Physics through the 1990s, 3. 67. National Academy of Sciences, Physics: Survey and Outlook, 67; Physics in Perspective, 142. 68. See Hoddeson and Baym, “Development of . . . the Theory of Metals”; Eckert, “Propaganda in Science”; James and Joas, “Subsequent and Subsidiary?” 69. Slater, “Solid State,” 10. 70. National Academy of Sciences, Physics through the 1990s. 71. National Academy of Sciences, Physics through the 1990s, viii, 23. 72. For an overview of the linear model, see Asner, “Linear Model,” and Godin, “Linear Model.” 73. Roy, “Funding Big Science,” 9. 74. See Edgerton, “Linear Model,” which suggests that the canonical formulation of the linear model, in which basic research provides the primary and most immediate basis for technical development, was rarely, if ever, defended. 75. Pippard, “Cat and the Cream.” CHAPTER 9. Mobilizing against Megascience

Epigraph: Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super Collider Project: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, 102nd Cong. 36 (April 16, 1991) (statement of Dr. Paul A. Fleury, Director, Physical Research Laboratory, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ). 1. Lederman, “Fermilab and the Future,” 125. 2. Pondrom, “Fixed Target,” 104. See also Riordan, Hoddeson, and Kolb, Tunnel Visions, 13–15. 3. Golden, “More Mini-Bangs”; “Hard Choices”; Herman, “Americans Want Accelerator.” 4. Superconducting Super Collider: Hearings Before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, 100th Cong. 245 (April 7, 8, and 9, 1987) (statement of Dr. Steven Weinberg, Theory Group, Physics Department, The University of Texas at Austin). 5. For discussions of the expedition of Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills from the perspective of the history of science, see Joyce and McCann, Burke and Wills. 6. Hossenfelder, “LHC ‘Nightmare Scenario.’” 7. Riordan, Hoddeson, and Kolb, Tunnel Visions, esp. ch. 1. 8. Hughes, “Making Dollars.” 9. For thorough accounts of the factors responsible for the SSC’s demise, see: Ritson, “Demise of the Texas Supercollider,” a snap reaction that faults lack of trust in academic expertise on the part of federal patrons and industrial managers; Kevles, Physicists, ix–xlii, which discusses the changes wrought by the end of the Cold War and the rise of an unsympathetic freshman congressional delegation; Riordan, “Tale of Two Cultures,” which examines dysfunction within the SSC’s management structure; and Hoddeson and Kolb, “Superconducting Super Collider’s Frontier Outpost,” which exposes the early disconnect between the vision of the physicists designing the SSC and the inclinations of those commanding the federal purse strings. 10. AEC Authorizing Legislation, Fiscal Year 1970: Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 91st Cong. 116 (April 17 and 18, 1969).

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11. Fleury did indeed say “non-zero-sum gain,” rather than “game,” the more common idiom, to indicate the argument that one field could enjoy outsized funding gains without impoverishing other areas. 12. On earlier uses of spin-off claims, see Hoddeson, Kolb, and Westfall, Fermilab, 54–55. 13. Lederman, “Value of Fundamental Science,” 42. 14. For a detailed discussion of the political shifts around the end of the Cold War and how they influenced the SSC, see Kevles, Physicists. 15. Energy and Water Development Appropriations for 1989: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 100th Cong. 72 (March 10, 1988). 16. Fiscal Year 1987 Department of Energy Authorization: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy Research and Production of the Committee on Science and Technology, House of Representatives, 99th Cong. 65 (March 5, 1986). On science, politics, and SDI, see Bridger, Scientists at War, ch. 9, and Slayton, “Discursive Choices.” 17. Fiscal Year 1987 Department of Energy Authorization, 228. 18. Fiscal Year 1987 Department of Energy Authorization, 4. 19. Proposed Fiscal Year 1990 Budget Request (DOE’s Office of Energy Research): Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, 101st Cong. 100 (February 24, 1989) (written statement of Dr. Roy F. Schwitters, Director, SSC Laboratory). 20. Proposed Fiscal Year 1990 Budget Request, 102. 21. Importance and Status of the Superconducting Super Collider: Joint Hearing Before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate, 102nd Cong. 27 (June 30, 1992) (statement of George F. Smoot III, Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, CA). 22. Importance and Status of the SSC, 25–26. 23. Bloembergen, Encounters in Magnetic Resonance; Bromberg, Laser in America. 24. Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super Collider Project, 43 (statement of Dr. Nicolaas Bloembergen, President, American Physical Society). 25. Nicolaas Bloembergen, letter to Richard A. Carrigan Jr., May 21, 1991, in Importance and Status of the SSC, 12. 26. Howard Wolpe and Sherwood Boehlert, letter to James D. Watkins, in Importance and Status of the SSC, 5–11. 27. Krumhansl, “Unity,” 38. 28. Browne, “Big Science.” 29. Importance and Status of the SSC, 13. 30. Superconducting Super Collider: Joint Hearing Before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate, 103rd Cong. (August 4, 1993) (written testimony of Rustum Roy), 10. 31. Assmus, “To Most Physicists.” 32. Schrage, “Glimpses of Truth.” 33. Bazell, “Quark Barrel Politics.” 34. Energy and Water Development Appropriations for 1989, 288. 35. The Superconducting Super Collider Project: Hearing Before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, 103rd Cong. 101 (May 26, 1993).

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36. Schweber, “Physics, Community, and the Crisis,” 40. 37. Importance and Status of the SSC, 24 (statement of Leon M. Lederman, Director Emeritus, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL). The misspelling of “Miletus,” the Greek city that was home to Thales and is widely considered to have been the cradle of Greek science and philosophy, is attributable to a transcription error rather than to Lederman himself. 38. Fiscal Year 1988 Department of Energy Authorization: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, 100th Cong. 143 (March 3 and 4, 1987). 39. Barry, “Searching for Particles of Logic.” 40. Weinberg, Dreams. 41. Superconducting Super Collider: Joint Hearing, 51 (statement of Dr. Steven Weinberg, Theory Group, Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin). 42. Superconducting Super Collider: Joint Hearing, 58 (statement of Dr. Steven Weinberg, Theory Group, Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin). 43. The extremity of the reductionism espoused in the context of the SSC debates has been emphasized by Barbara L. Whitten, who argues that “Lederman and [Sheldon] Glashow, firmly entrenched in the reductionist paradigm and totally unable to hear what the others are saying, resemble straw men constructed by feminist critics to display arrogant androcentric science at its most glaring.” Whitten, “What Physics Is Fundamental,” 10. 44. Superconducting Super Collider: Joint Hearing, 57 (statement of Dr. Philip W. Anderson, Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ). 45. Establishing Priorities in Science Funding: Hearing Before the Task Force on Defense, Foreign Policy and Space of the Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, 102nd Cong. 64 (July 11 and 18, 1991) (statement of Philip W. Anderson, Ph.D., Joseph Henry Professor, Princeton University). The word “more,” which was omitted in the transcript, can be reasonably inferred. 46. The SSC Project, 109. 47. Weinberg, Dreams; Lederman and Teresi, God Particle. 48. Weinberg, “Answer.” 49. Dutta, “Supercollider Is Science.” 50. Establishing Priorities in Science Funding, 2. 51. Superconducting Super Collider: Joint Hearing, 13. 52. For further discussions of the SSC debate in terms of unification, see Cat, “Physicists’ Debates.” 53. Cranberg, “Paradoxical ‘Unities,’” 102. 54. Kadanoff, “Complex Structures,” 10. 55. Kadanoff, “Cathedrals and Other Edifices,” 9. 56. Kadanoff, “The Big, the Bad,” 11. 57. Anderson, “Is Complexity Physics?” 9. 58. As Cat has argued, the reductionist unity particle physicists sought was counterproductive for the goal of methodological unity. Cat, “Physicists’ Debates.” 59. The SSC Project, 109. 60. Proposed Fiscal Year 1990 Budget Request, 134. 61. Superconducting Super Collider: Hearings, 906 (written statement of Dr. Philip W. Anderson, Joseph Henry Professor of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ). 62. Superconducting Super Collider: Hearings, 334 (written statement of Dr. James A. Krumhansl, Horace White Professor of Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY).

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63. Superconducting Super Collider: Hearings, 906 (written statement of Dr. Philip W. Anderson). 64. Varma, “Changing Research Cultures.” 65. National Science Foundation, “NSF Funding History by Account and FY, Constant Dollars,” accessed April 5, 2017, https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFFundingby AccountConstantDollars.pdf. 66. US Department of Energy, “BES Budget,” accessed April 5, 2017, https://science .energy.gov/bes/about/bes-budget/. 67. Weisel, “Properties and Phenomena,” is an edifying account of the conception of “basic research” that developed in plasma physics, which faced many of the same challenges as solid state physics, including the carefully cultivated perception that the big questions of physics were the unique province of high energy physics and cosmology. 68. Proposed Fiscal Year 1990 Budget Request, 158 (AAAS Panel Funding and the Academic Physical Sciences, January 17, 1989). 69. MacLeod and Radick, “Ownership in the Technosciences.” 70. Rowall, “Condensed Matter Physics.” 71. Rowall, “Condensed Matter Physics,” 45. 72. Superconducting Super Collider: Hearings, 904 (written statement of Philip W. Anderson, Joseph Henry Professor of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ). 73. Proposed Fiscal Year 1990 Budget Request, 137 (written statement of Philip W. Anderson, Joseph Henry Professor of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ). 74. Hoddeson and Kolb, “Superconducting Super Collider’s Frontier Outpost.” See also Martin, “Prestige Asymmetry.” 75. Proposed Fiscal Year 1990 Budget Request, 138 (written statement of Philip W. Anderson). 76. Arthur L. Schawlow, letter to Felix Bloch, October 18, 1967, FBPS, box 8, folder 15. 77. For argument of continuity across each of these shifts, see: Shapin, Scientific Revolution; Taltavull, “Transmitting Knowledge”; and Nye, Before Big Science. 78. Kevles, Physicists, xii. 79. Doing, Velvet Revolution; Crease, “National Synchrotron Light Source”; Rush, “US Neutron Facility”; Westfall, “Institutional Persistence.” For a perspective on the European context, see Heinze, Hallonsten, and Heinecke, “From Periphery to Center” and “Turning the Ship.” 80. Crease and Westfall, “New Big Science.” CONCLUSIONS

Epigraph: COSMAT, Materials and Man’s Needs, 4:10. 1. The membership of the American Physical Society in 2000 was 41,570. It surpassed 36,000, one thousand times its charter membership, in 1985. 2. Shinbrot, “Editorial.” Physical Review Applied followed quickly on the heels of Physical Review X, the APS contribution to online, open-access publishing, which boasts broad coverage of “pure, applied, and interdisciplinary physics” reminiscent of the early years of the original Physical Review. Data on the Physical Review family of journals can be found at https://journals.aps.org/about. 3. Attentive readers will note that this is apparently contradicted by Arthur von Hippel’s statement, reported in chapter 6, to the effect that the boundary between physics and

NOTES TO PAGES 203–211

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electrical engineering was crumbling. The sentiment von Hippel expressed, although indicative of a local pattern of encouraging interdisciplinary exchange at MIT, was far from being sanctified by so mighty a church as the Physical Review in the 1940s. 4. Forman, “On the Historical Forms” and “Primacy of Science.” 5. Eisler, “‘Ennobling Unity’”; McCray, “Will Small Be Beautiful?”; Mody, Instrumental Community. 6. The last division to be formed in the twentieth century, representing the physics of particle beams, was established in 1989. 7. Christian Joas observes that common anecdotes about arrogant quantum or particle physicists making snide remarks deriding “squalid state physics” (Murray Gell-Mann) or “Schmutzphysik” (Wolfgang Pauli) are trafficked extensively by solid state physicists themselves, indicating that an oppositional attitude was part of the field’s identity. Joas, “Campos que interagem.” 8. Superconducting Super Collider: Hearings Before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, 100th Cong. 244 (April 7, 8, and 9, 1987) (written statement of Dr. Daniel Kleppner, Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics and Associate Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA). 9. Pais, Inward Bound. 10. On the theory-experiment relationship in high energy physics, see Pickering, Constructing Quarks, and Galison, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic. On Feynman diagrams, see Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart. For accounts of large accelerator laboratories, see Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, Heilbron and Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory, and Hoddeson, Kolb, and Westfall, Fermilab. 11. There has been a recent uptick in interest in counterfactual history of science, seeking to revive the technique as a flexible but neglected tool for throwing light on otherwise obscure features of the historical process. For an overview, see Radick, “Presidential Address.” 12. On the character and consequences of the Cold War population boom, see Kaiser, American Physics. A summary and chapter outline are available at http://web.mit.edu /dikaiser/www/CWB.html. 13. On how this picture of the world influenced science and technology in the Cold War, see Edwards, Closed World.

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INDEX

ab initio methods, 89, 126, 224n41 Abraham, Max, 105, 227n7 accreditation of physicists, 45–47 Acoustical Society of America, 23–25, 40, 50, 201 acoustics, 7, 36, 39, 106, 152 Advanced Research Projects Agency, 121, 124–31, 133, 153, 162, 230n12, 231n29 advisory system, federal, 86, 90–91, 121– 26, 133, 153, 159 Air Force Office of Scientific Research. See United States Air Force American Association of Physics Teachers, 40, 217n12 American Chemical Society, 50, 59, 78, 225n56, 231n39 American culture: and big science, 188, 196–97, 200, 210; place of physics within, 8–11, 174; pure science ideal as a foil to, 18–20, relevance of physics to, 34 American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 21–22, 107, 217n17 American Institute of Mechanical Engineers, 63–64, 231n39 American Institute of Physics, as an alternative to the American Physical Society, 34–37, 39–43; and the Conference of Physicists, 45, 50–53; founding of, 24; member societies of,

217n23; publishing operations of, 78, 80, 84, 91–93, 96–98, 100, 110, 185, 201, 236n45; survey conducted by, 85; War Policy Committee of, 213n5 American Philosophical Society, 45, 50, 220n14 American Physical Society, council of, 41–44, 52–53, 56, 61, 65, 68–69, 76– 78, 91–93, 99, 119, 132, 161, 208; disposition toward applied research, 39–45, 49–54, 65, 74–75, 200–202; divisions of, 50, 56–62, 65–69, 73, 76–78, 81, 87, 112, 131–33, 144, 153, 159, 164, 170, 204, 219n5, 220n19, 221n49; dominant place in American physics, 33–37, 217n23; as a foil for American pragmatism, 21–24, 31; founding of, 5, 11–14, 19–20, 196; intersociety relationships of, 231n39; journals of, 26–27, 30, 97–98, 100, 157, 225n56, 235n25, 240nn1–2; meetings of, 20, 38, 41–42, 52, 56, 58–59, 61–62, 64–69, 76–78, 92–93, 99, 103, 138, 161, 170, 179, 217n12, 223n3; membership of, 29, 84, 86, 215nn12–14, 218n29, 222nn1–2, 230n1; presidents of, 11, 32, 42, 44, 50, 68, 178–79; and the real estate business, 60, 220n15 American Physics Teacher, 25 American Society for Metals, 63–64

268

INDEX

amorphous solids, 15, 62, 64, 156, 195 Anderson, Philip W.: opposition to SSC, 3–4, 10, 182–84, 186–92, 194–95; opposition to reductionism, 15, 137; 140–52, 206, 233nn37–38; early adopter of condensed matter physics, 154, 235n44; and intellectual merit of solid state physics, 159, 160–61, 166; role in the Aspen Center for Physics 163; comparison to Douglas Adams 233n31 applications. See applied physics applied physics: and disciplinary federalism, 39–44; early twentieth century growth of, 24–28, 30, 33, 35; as extensive research 140; and federal funding priorities, 175–76, 183–89, 194–95; as the future of solid state research, 148; marginalization of, 5, 13–16, 30, 36, 41, 52, 60, 84, 120, 200–202, 205, 207–8; in materials science, 122–23, 125, 127, 129–33; in the media, 150–52, 154; at the National Magnet Laboratory, 104–107, 109, 111–15, 117; and physics education, 48–49; as a problematic category, 7, 20–22, 41, 217n9, 228n11; representation in the APS, 65–67, 69–75; routes from basic research to, 160, 162–68, 229n27, 231n29, 232n14; societies and journals dedicated to, 35, 39, 240n2; in song, 23 applied research. See applied physics approximation techniques, 72, 89, 90, 156–57, 225n45 Argonne National Laboratory, 197 ARPA. See Advanced Research Projects Agency

Aspen Center for Physics, 163 astrophysics, 191, 223n3, 227n76 Atomic Energy Commission, 10, 102–4, 112–13, 115, 172, 227n6, 231n24 atomic physics, 27, 73, 87, 135, 185, 227n76 Bardeen, John, 147, 158, 224n33, 225n53, 235n29 Barnes, R. Bowling, 49 Barry, Dave, 182 Barton, Henry, 45, 59, 80, 92 basic research: accessibility to solid state researchers, 148, 159–60, 162–64; federal support for, 16, 120–25, 128–33, 136, 142, 144, 172–73, 175–78, 185, 187–89, 191–92, 194–95, 233n24; industrial support for, 191–92; institutional representation for, 40–42, 45, 63, 67, 71, 74–75; at large facilities, 14, 206; and metallurgy, 106; at the National Magnet Laboratory, 108–11, 113–15; and pedagogy, 49, 128; popularity of, 84; as a problematic category, 7, 21, 217n9, 228n11, 240n67; profitability of, 119; relationship to technical outcomes, 167–68, 194–95, 203, 216n3, 228n15, 229n27, 231n29, 232n15, 237n74; and scientific merit, 138 Bell Telephone Laboratories: architecture of, 231n29; breakup of, 163, 193; employees of, 119, 174, 215n14, 218n33, 224n33; establishment of, 22; lack of gemütlichkeit, 142; meeting held at, 23; Philip Anderson at, 3, 137, 142–43; represented at the Conference of Physicists, 32, 46–47, 49–50;

269

INDEX

solid state research and, 63, 71, 73, 91, 95, 162, 220n28, 232n15; William Shockley at, 57, 84–85 big science: excesses of, 205–7; and federal spending, 172, 186–89, 191–92; as a historiographical category 227n5; limits of, 16; for solid state physics, 102–4, 117 biology: antireduction in, 233n31; ascent to prominence, 9, 149, 172, 197; contrasted with physics, 6; molecular, 210; relevance of physics for, 49, 165, 179 Bitter, Francis, 102, 105–11, 114–15, 117, 187, 220n26, 227–28nn8–13 BKS theory. See Bohr–Kramers–Slater theory Bloch, Felix, 89, 147, 196 Bloembergen, Nicolaas, 112, 178–79 Boehlert, Sherwood, 178–80, 185 Bohr–Kramers–Slater theory, 88–89, 224n41 Bohr, Niels. See Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory Bond, James, 210–11 Breck, Otto, 71 Breit, Gregory, 209 Brillouin, Lèon, 62, 89, 220n24, 225n45 Brinkman Report, The, 163–67 Bristol, University of, 157 Bromley Report, The, 159–63 Brookhaven National Laboratory, 91, 94, 103–4, 197, 235n28 Brooks, Harvey, 94, 96–98, 100, 158–59, 162, 225n53 Brown University, 27, 109, 125, 164 Browne, Malcolm, 150, 179 bubble chambers, 135, 207

Buckley, Oliver E., 32, 34, 47–48, 51 Burstein, Elias, 77 California, Santa Barbara, University of, 163 Cambridge, University of, 18, 147–48, 235n44 Carnegie Institute of Technology, 57, 63, 69, 84, 94 Cavendish Laboratory, 87, 105, 154, 227n8, 235n44 ceramics. See amorphous solids chemical engineering, 71, 88, 89, 126, 130 chemical physics, 52, 93–95, 165, 191, 225n56, 226n58 chemistry, and emergence: 144–45, 179; Eugene Wigner and, 88–89; in France, 156–57; as a fundamental science, 105–7; industrial relevance of, 191; in industry, 36; at the Institute for the Study of Metals, 164–65; and materials science, 122–24, 126–27, 130; Nobel Prize for, 150; physicists’ collaboration with, 63, 73, 79, 81, 86, 93–97, 100, 109, 120, 201, 208; in physics pedagogy, 90; professional identity, 21, 32, 33, 47–49, 51–52, 60–61, 213n3, 214n10, 225n53, 225nn55–56, 226n58, 226n64, 230n20, 231n29; publications, 14, 25, 27, 92–95 Chicago, University of: faculty of, 22, 159, 123, 164, 186, 217n9, 218n33; as IDL site, 125; influence on Alvin Weinberg, 137–38; publications from, 142 Clogston, Albert M., 119–20

270

INDEX

Cohen, Morill, 159 Cold War: big science and, 103; demands of the, 14–16, 52, 120–22, 172–74, 209, 216n3; end of, 172, 174, 196, 237n9; Manichaeism of, 211; prestige of physics in, 4–5, 7–11, 56, 197, 205, 210 Columbia University, 95, 105, 142, 217n15, 218n32 Columbus, Christopher, 171 Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering, 121, 129–33 complexity, 15, 163, 168, 187, 208 Compton effect. See Compton, Arthur Holly Compton, Arthur Holly, 33, 88, 224n41 Compton, Karl, 87, 218n49 computers, 89, 126, 150, 175, 177, 193, 208 condensed matter physics. See solid state physics Conference of Physicists, National Research Council. See National Research Council Congress. See United States Congress consumer culture, 11, 122 Cooper, Leon, 147, 158, 235n29 Cornell University, 47, 72, 123, 125, 142, 179 COSMAT. See Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering cosmology, 136, 177, 181, 189, 195, 208, 240n67 Cosmos Club, 24, 217n23 counterfactuals, 208–10 Cranberg, Lawrence, 186 Crease, Robert P., 103, 197

crystal structure physics: as a component of solid state physics, 5, 69, 156; quantum mechanical approaches to, 55, 62–63, 72, 89; metallurgy and, 106, 164; technical relevance of, 130–31, 156 DARPA. See Advanced Research Projects Agency Darrow, Karl Kelcher: on absenteeism at APS meetings, 58; and the fable of the bell and the cat, 45; friendship with John Van Vleck, 60, 220n14; oversight of APS divisions, 42–44, 50, 52, 57, 60–62, 64–66, 68, 75–77, 219n5, 221n31; response to the publication problem, 92, 98; visiting professorships, 218n33 Davisson, Clinton, 22 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. See Advanced Research Projects Agency density functional theory, 163, 226n64, 236n56 Department of Defense, 102, 104, 111, 115, 120–21, 123, 127 Department of Energy, 10, 172, 175–77, 179, 192 Derge, Gerhard, 63 Disciplines: and accreditation, 45; boundaries of, 5, 13, 33–35, 47–49, 53, 106; competition among, 14, 148, 185–87, 191–92; experimental, 69, 128–31; formation of, 7, 31, 55, 78–80, 125, 153–55, 166–68, 213n3; interaction among, 17, 91, 95–96, 107, 126, 138, 164, 187, 198;

INDEX

and professional identity, 12, 21, 99–100, 118, 120–21, 200–205, 207, 216n3; representation of, 30; unity of, 86 Division of Condensed Matter Physics, American Physical Society, 132, 161 Division of Electron and Ion Optics, American Physical Society, 43, 52, 60, 67–68, 219n4, 223n3 Division of Fluid Dynamics, American Physical Society, 161–62 Division of High Polymer Physics, American Physical Society, 52, 56, 67–69, 218n34, 221n49 Division of Materials Physics, American Physical Society, 132 Division of Particles and Fields, American Physical Society, 144, 170 Division of Solid State Physics, American Physical Society: founding of, 13, 39, 53–54, 56, 69, 87; growth of, 75–78; integration of academic and industrial researchers within, 65, 70–72, 75; membership of, 133, 222n2, 229n31; name change, 161–62; participation in Federation of Materials Societies, 132; John Van Vleck as chair of, 223n4 Dresselhaus, Mildred, 72, 126, 222n63 Dushman, Saul, 57, 219n9 Dutta, Pulak, 185 Eastman-Kodak, 23 economic relevance of physics: disdain for, 10, 13; high energy physicists’ ambivalence about, 117, 181; relationship to pure science ideal, 16, 19–20, 196; role in sustaining prestige of physics, 11, 14, 179, 200;

271

source of international competitiveness, 174–75, 193–94 Edison, Thomas, 19–20 Einstein, Albert, 9, 147, 209 electrical engineering: at MIT 108–9, 126–27; origins in physics, 39, 208; overlap with physics, 36, 73, 130, 240n3; place in physics pedagogy, 48 electromagnetism, 6–7, 19, 21, 29, 100, 182 electronics. See electrical engineering emergence: deployed in opposition to the SSC, 181, 194; Philip Anderson’s support for, 15, 137, 145, 149; roots in condensed matter phenomena, 206 émigré physicists, 30, 86–87 engineering, accelerator: 177; at Bell Laboratories, 24; chemical, 88; Manhattan Project and, 8, 208, 214n10; materials science and, 120–24, 126–27, 129–20, 132–33, 231n29; physics as glorified 48–49; professional identity of, 21–22; publications, 27; radar and, 216n1; relationship to physics, 14, 33, 39, 41–42, 63, 73–74, 96, 106–107, 179, 201–3, 228n11; training, 105. See also electrical engineering England. See Great Britain federal advisory system. See advisory system, federal federal funding. See funding, federal Fermilab. See National Accelerator Laboratory ferromagnetism, 68, 71, 105, 156, 208, 227n8 festkörperphysik, 156, 234n16

272

INDEX

First World War, 21 Fletcher, Harvey, 50, 69 Fleury, Paul A., 174, 181, 188, 237n11 fluids, 15, 162–63, 186 Forman, Paul, 203, 216n3, 228n15 France, 61–62, 156–57, 234n11, 235n25 Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory. See National Magnet Laboratory Franck, James, 165 Friedel, Jacque, 156–57 fundamental physics: funding for, 171, 173–74, 177–78; institutional organization to protect, 39, 41–42; materials research as, 128–29; nature of, 16, 136–40, 142–50, 174, 210, 228n15; reductionism and, 15, 181, 183–85, 187–89, 211; relationship to applications, 111, 114–18, 193–95; as a public good, 176–77, 227–28n11; solid state physics as, 14, 95, 102, 104–8, 153–54, 158, 164, 166–67, 199, 232n14 funding, federal: for basic research, 187; of big science, 16, 104, 173, 176, 182, 191–92, 237n9; coupled to practical goals, 111–13, 117, 120–21, 160, 167, 174–75; of high energy physics, 10– 11, 82, 144, 172; incentives created by, 153; influence on postwar physics, 35, 52, 149; of materials science 14, 129, 131, 133; through the National Science Foundation, 102; priorities, 11, 116, 137, 189, 204; for social programs, 103; tightening of, 14, 103–4, 136, 138 Fuqua, Don, 175–76

Gamow, George, 83 Gell-Mann, Murray, 12, 213n6, 232n12, 241n7 General Electric: founding of research laboratory, 22; Frederick Seitz at, 90, 97; publications of, 142–43; Roman Smoluchowski at, 13, 39, 56–57, 69 Germany, 18–20, 61, 155–57, 209, 213n3, 235n25 Gibbs, Roswell C., 47–48, 51 glass. See amorphous solids Goldsmith, Alfred N., 38–39 Goudsmit, Samuel, 83, 92, 99, 235n28 Gray, Dwight, 152 Great Britain, 18–19, 21, 87, 157, 235n23, 235n25 group of six, 13, 57–62, 65–69, 76, 86– 87, 93, 219n5 Guggenheim Foundation, 105 Hansen, William Webster, 33 Harnwell, Gaylord Probasco: role in establishing Physics Today, 80, 83; support for disciplinary federalism 36–40, 42, 49–53, 74–75, 217n12; as University of Pennsylvania president, 63–64 Harvard University: Edwin Kemble at, 48; George Pake at, 226n61; Harvey Brooks at, 94, 96; interdisciplinary laboratory hosted at, 125; John Slater at, 126; John Van Vleck at, 58, 87, 223n4; Nicolaas Bloembergen at, 112, 178; Philip Anderson at, 3, 142; Radio Research Laboratory of, 85 Herring, Conyers, 95, 224n33, 225n53

INDEX

Higgs boson, 171 high energy physics: APS division for, 132; as big science, 14–16, 102, 104, 114–18, 197, 205–7; competition between solid state physics and, 79, 114–18, 135–40, 143–150; derision of solid state physics within, 12, 241n7; funding for, 11, 227n6; historiographical focus on, 208–10; potential source of world-eating black holes, 214n25; prestige of, 4, 159, 200; productivity claims for 3, 192–96, 202; publications, 161; and the SSC, 170–90, 192–95, 197; visibility of, 8, 10–11, 82, 112. See also reductionism Hoddeson, Lillian, 10, 172 House of Representatives, 3, 175, 179, 184–85, 189, 196 Hull, Albert W., 32, 44 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 137 Hutchisson, Elmer, 37–39, 217n15 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 21 IBM, 132, 14–43, 147, 193, 231n29 Illinois, University of, 90–91, 126, 142 industry: basic research in, 119, 143; British, 19, 214–15n4; condensed matter physics distances itself from, 165, 167–68; German, 19, 214–15n4; growth of physics in, 19–22, 30, 35, 69, 92, 152, 173, 215n12, 224n29; laboratories, 22, 100, 163, 193–94, 197, 205, 231n29, 232n15; marginalization of, 19, 21, 24, 28–29; pharmaceutical, 150; and physics pedagogy, 48–49, 148, 159, 191; and physics publishing, 26–27, 142, 221n36;

273

professional representation for, 5, 13–14, 16–17, 24, 31, 36–37, 42–52, 54, 195, 199–201, 208; proposed APS division for, 62; relationship with academia, 23, 34–37, 41–44, 47, 72, 75, 84–86, 157, 168, 201, 217n41, 218n33; role sustaining prestige of physics, 12; roots of solid state physics in, 15, 56, 58, 62–67, 69, 72, 74, 96–97, 153, 162, 168, 198; technologies developed in, 11, 54, 73, 142–43 Institute for the Study of Metals, University of Chicago, 123, 164–65 Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen, 88, 224n41 Institute of Radio Engineers, 38–39, 217n17 intellectual property, 172, 192–93 interdisciplinarity: in chemical physics, 93, 225n56; in materials science, 120–22, 124–26, 128, 131, 133, 204; in metallurgy, 164; perspectives of among solid state physicists, 95–97; as a value, 56, 240nn2–3 Interdisciplinary Laboratories, 121, 125– 26, 128–31, 162, 231n29 integrated circuits, 11, 163 International Journal of the Physics and Chemistry of Solids, 97–98 International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, 78 James Franck Institute, 164–65 Johns Hopkins University, 20, 225n56 Journal of Applied Physics: editorial direction of, 201, 221n36; editorials and letters in, 37–39, 43, 65–66;

274

INDEX

Journal of Applied Physics (cont.): editors of, 37, 217n15; publications of the National Magnet Laboratory in 113, 228n22; renamed from Physics, 27 Journal of Chemical Physics, 25, 92, 201–2, 225n25 Journal of Rheology, 25, 30, 201 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25, 201 Journal of the Optical Society of America, 25, 201 journals. See publishing Kadanoff, Leo, 164–65, 186 Katcher, David A., 80–81 Kelly, Mervin, 49–50 Kemble, Edwin, 48–49, 87, 126, 230n16 Kevles, Daniel J., 32–34, 196–97, 216n3 Kincaid, John F., 126–28 Kittel, Charles, 72–73, 143, 225n53 Kleppa, Ole, 165 Kleppner, Daniel, 205 Kohn, Walter, 94, 96, 154, 162–63, 226n64 Kolm, Henry, 113–14, 229n36 Kramers, Henrik, 88 Krumhansl, James, 123, 179, 191 Laboratory for Insulation Research, 127, 230n20 Large Hadron Collider, 171, 214n25 lasers, 11, 177–78, 196, 236n45 Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 81, 143, 207, 214n11 Lax, Benjamin, 104, 109–14, 117, 160, 173, 229n36 Lederman, Leon, 170, 174, 176–78, 182, 184, 202

levels of physical organization, 15, 139, 144–49, 181, 186–87, 208, 233n31 Lincoln Laboratory, 109, 126, 143 linear model of innovation, 167, 231n29, 237n74 liquid helium, 15, 81, 162, 179 liquids, 152, 154–56, 160, 196 Livingstone, M. Stanley, 136 Los Alamos, 112, 209 low temperatures, 6, 108, 147, 164 magnetic resonance imaging, 167, 175, 178–79 magnetism, 28, 60, 102, 105, 113, 164, 166 magnets, 11, 127, 167, 177, 178–79 Manhattan Project: Alvin Weinberg’s employment with, 138; associations between basic research and, 120, 214n10; Bern Porter’s employment with, 27; as engineering endeavor, 8–10, 208–9; institutional legacy of, 164; secrecy around, 32, 35 Mansfield Amendments, 115, 120 many-body physics, 160–61 Massachusetts Institute of Technology: faculty of, 72–73, 83, 86–87, 89, 105, 139, 228n13, 240n3; laboratories of, 14, 23, 85, 107–118, 125–26, 143; solid state theory course, 72; students of, 86, 222n63 Materials Advisory Board, 122–24. See also National Research Council Materials and Man’s Needs. See Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering Materials Research Centers. See Interdisciplinary Laboratories

INDEX

Materials Research Society, 167–79 materials research. See materials science materials science: APS division for, 132; ARPA support for, 124–29; as a disciplinary category, 56, 120–24, 129–24, 153–54, 166, 197, 203; funding for, 14; practical objectives of, 132, 160, 168; not science, 129; training in, 124 mechanics, 7, 28, 44, 166 megascience, 188, 194, 200, 206, 209 Metallurgical Laboratory, University of Chicago, 164 metallurgy: collaboration with, 58, 63–64, 90, 164–65; Francis Bitter’s vision for, 102–9, 220n26, 228n13; materials science and, 120, 122–23, 126, 130; relationship to physics, 51, 60–61, 73, 96, 208, 214n10, 230n20; teaching of, 48 Michigan State University, 35, 217n10 Mody, Cyrus C. M., 94, 126 “More Is Different,” 15, 143–150, 152, 160, 187, 188, 194 Mott, Nevill, 90, 143, 150, 157 muons, 7, 155 Muskat, Morris, 36, 217n9 National Academy of Sciences: biographical memoirs of, 26; membership in, 110, 143, 232–33n22; policy advice of, 121; reports, 129–30, 153, 157. See also National Research Council National Accelerator Laboratory: contributions of, 178–79; funding for, 104, 112, 185; histories of, 207; justifications for 115, 117; members of in orbit, 176; opposition to, 112, 173; Tevatron, 171

275

National Bureau of Standards, 52, 61, 215n14 national defense, 10, 22, 120, 123, 125, 174–75 National Institutes of Health, 111, 188 National Magnet Laboratory: as big science, 14, 102–104, 112, 115, 197, 200; founding of, 107–10; funding for, 104, 108, 110–15, 117–18, 173; research conducted at, 108–111, 113–14 National Research Council: Conference of Physicists, 32, 45–51, 80; Solid State Sciences Panel, 110; survey of industrial laboratories, 63; surveys of solid state and condensed matter physics, 157, 159, 160–62, 165, 167, 193. See also Materials Advisory Board; National Academy of Sciences National Science Foundation: establishment, 102; support of APS journals, 91–92, 98–99; support of condensed matter physics, 192; support of high energy physics, 104, 188, 227n6; support of materials science, 133; support of National Magnet Laboratory, 110–12, 114 national security. See national defense National Synchrotron Light Source, 103, 197 new big science, 103, 196–98 New York Times, 150, 179, 184, 216n1 Nobel Prize: Burton Richter, 154; Clinton Davisson, 22; Isidor Isaac Rabi, 23; James Franck, 165; John Bardeen, 224n33; John Van Vleck, 150; Leon Lederman, 170; Nevill Mott, 150; Nicolaas Bloembergen, 178;

276

INDEX

Nobel Prize (cont.): Philip Anderson, 143, 150, 183; Steven Weinberg, 182; Walter Kohn, 226n64 Noble, David F., 21, 215n5 noncrystaline solids. See amorphous solids Northwestern University, 56, 125, 185 nuclear arms race, 9, 232n3 nuclear magnetic resonance, 11, 94, 145, 178, 226n61, 226n64 nuclear physics: APS division, 132, 229n31; as a discipline, 55; funding for, 102, 192; overlap with high energy physics, 10–11, 135–36, 177; political influence of, 4, 8–10, 143, 176, 205; and population growth, 30; prestige of, 81–84, 200, 207–10; publications, 26, 79, 93, 227n76; research in 88; and undersea saxophone, 182 nuclear weapons, 32, 34, 52, 112 Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 27, 103, 137–38, 197 Office of Naval Research, 102, 121 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 9, 81, 209 Optical Society of America, 23, 25, 40, 201 optics, 7, 39, 49, 108, 155, 166, 227n76 Osgood, Thomas H., 35, 40 Pais, Abraham, 24–25, 207 Pake Report, The, 157–59, 162, 166, 235n30 Pake, George E., 94, 158 Panofsky, Wolfgang, 115, 135 particle physics. See high energy physics Pastore, John O., 115–17, 173 Pauli, Wolfgang, 12, 147, 241n7

pedagogy, 32, 35, 72, 109, 126, 199, 207 Pegram, George, 44, 91, 221n43 Pennsylvania, University of, 36, 63–64, 125 Pergamon Press, 97 Philosophical Magazine, 26 physical chemistry. See chemical physics, 93, 164, 225n56 Physical Review: ability to read cover-tocover, 24–27; editorship, 83, 92; as flagship journal, 24; growth of, 79–80, 86, 201–2; narrowing of focus, 13, 26–27; profitability of, 91–92; publication delays, 78, 97, 99; publications in, 110, 113, 221n36; solid state physicists consider abandoning, 79, 93–94; subdivision of, 142, 155, 200, 240n2 Physical Review Applied, 200, 202, 240n2 Physics. See Journal of Applied Physics Physics Today: articles in, 58, 87, 137, 139, 152, 179, 228n11; as a discussion forum, 36, 80–84; founding of, 51, 204; discussions of unity in, 185–87 Physik der kondensierten Materie, 155, 159 physique du solide, 155–57, 235n23 Pick, Heinz, 156 Pines, David, 158, 163 Pippard, Brian, 147–48, 158, 168 plasma physics, 8, 159, 191, 240n67 Porter, Bernard H., 27–30 prestige: of the APS, 77–78; discussed at the Conference of Physicists, 47–48; glut of in postwar physics, 39, 148–49, 172; of high energy physics, 4; international, 104; maintenance of, 7–10;

INDEX

solid state physics competes for, 73, 150–51, 159–61, 165, 168, 187, 189–90, 194, 204–5 Princeton University, 4, 27, 86–87, 89, 143 productivity claims, 192–96 professional identity: and applied research, 27, 36, 45, 54–56, 74, 207; as conceived in different branches of physics, 4–5, 81; of engineering, 21; impact of APS divisions on, 65; of physics as a whole, 7, 10, 12, 19, 31–32, 44, 54–56, 121, 134, 137, 193, 199, 210; of solid state physics, 9, 14, 78–79, 99, 118, 120, 129, 133, 151–52, 158, 196, 202, 204, 241n7 Project Hindsight, 120 publishing: American Institute of Physics operations, 24–27, 30, 50–51; American Physical Society operations, 25–27, 41, 43; and condensed matter physics, 155–57; page charges, 225n49; popular, 184–85; problems, 14, 76–101, 131, 209; outlets for, 13, 24–27, 200–202, 221n36, 223n9, 225n55 pure science: American Physical Society as a haven for, 12, 20, 59–61, 67; as a category, 7, 227–28n11; as an ideal, 5, 12–14, 16–17, 18–31, 33, 35, 76, 104, 117, 132, 134, 135, 154, 165, 170, 173, 198–204; and physics pedagogy, 63; relationship to applied physics, 5, 40–42, 84, 148; unity and, 69–70 quantum mechanics: of complex matter, 15, 94–96, 160, 163–64, 166, 168, 232n14; of elementary particles, 185;

277

as a historiographical category, 6, 196; John Slater’s contributions to, 87–89; John Van Vleck’s contributions to, 60, 71; as a phenomenological category, 7; in the Physical Review, 26–27, 201; of solids, 72, 102, 104, 146; as a source of conceptual unity, 55–56, 204 quantum theory, 48, 62, 126 Rabi, Isidor Isaac, 7, 23, 131 Radiation Laboratory, MIT, 23, 85, 109. See also Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radio Research Laboratory, Harvard University, 85. See also Harvard University Read, Thomas A., 57 reductionism: feminist critique of, 239n43; importance to high energy physics, 135–36, 140, 170, 173, 181– 85, 197, 202, 205, 211; relationship to spin-off claims, 177–78; solid state physicists’ objections to, 15, 136–37, 144–45, 148–50, 185–89, 206–7, 233n31; used to justify the SSC, 3 Research Laboratory of Electronics, 127 Review of Scientific Instruments, 25, 36–37, 201, 228n22 Reviews of Modern Physics, 25 Richter, Burton, 154, 182, 192 Richtmyer, Floyd K., 25 Robinson, Howard A., 84 Rowland, Henry Augustus: as an advocate for pure science, 12, 19–21, 26, 35, 41, 154, 170, 198–200, 204, 210, 215n7; on the study of matter, 11 Roy, Rustum, 167, 179

278

INDEX

Santa Fe Institute, 163, 236n58 Sawyer, Ralph A., 49, 218n44 Schmutzphysik, 12, 211, 241n7 Schrieffer, J. Robert, 147, 158, 235n29 Schwitters, Roy, 177–78 science policy, 4, 9–11, 113, 130, 184, 198, 206 Second World War, 9, 31, 35, 56, 62, 196, 208–9 Seitz, Frederick: as corporate shill, 220n21; correspondence with Gaylord Harnwell, 80; education, 224n33; member of APS council, 77–78; member of the group of six, 57, 61–62, 64, 67; member of Materials Advisory Board, 123; presidency of National Academy of Sciences, 157; and the publication problem, 85–91, 92–98, 100; textbook authorship, 72–73, 222n60; views on APS divisions, 41–42; views on postwar personnel shortage, 84–85 semiconductors, 11, 94–95, 150, 163, 177–78 Shockley, William, 57, 84, 86, 94, 142, 225n53 Siegel, Sidney, 57, 63, 221n43 SLAC. See Stanford Linear Accelerator Slater, John Clarke: abstract approach to physics, 72; advisor of William Shockley, 86; applications of the Wigner– Seitz method, 90; calculational approach to physics, 89; conflict with Niels Bohr, 88, 244n41; early career, 87; involvement with MIT’s interdisciplinary laboratory, 126–128; involvement with the National Magnet Laboratory 107, 109; named as a

leading solid state physicist, 225n53; perspective on the history of solid state physics, 166 Slichter, Charles, 143 small science, 178, 188–89, 206 Smith, Cyril Stanley, 123, 130, 164 Smoluchowski, Roman: arrival in United States, 56; correspondence with Benjamin Lax, 110; correspondence with Frederick Seitz, 86; efforts to establish the Division of Solid State Physics, 13, 39, 56–58, 60–67, 69, 219n9, 221n31; member of Pake Report committee, 158–59; vision for American physics, 39, 58, 63–65, 122, 153, 164 Smoot, George, 177–78 Society of Rheology, 24 solid state electronics, 130, 150 solid state physics: definition of, 5–7; diversity of, 6, 8, 11, 16, 73, 90, 95–96, 187; growth of, 7, 11, 14, 16, 76–79, 92–93, 229n31; establishment of, 56–70; and identity of American physics, 4–12, 19, 31, 54–56, 99, 121, 134, 137, 193, 199, 202; as a name, 15, 62–65, 73, 152–54; as opposed to condensed matter physics, 154–69; relationship to nuclear and high energy physics, 8–10, 55, 81–84, 93, 132, 136, 143, 176–77, 192, 200, 205–10; slurs directed at, 12, 211, 241n7; as an unusual category, 7, 13, 29–31, 70, 152–53. See also applications Soviet Union, 124, 172, 174, 221n36, 232n3 spin-offs, 15, 174–82, 185, 187, 193, 202 “squalid state physics,” 12, 241n7

INDEX

Stanford Linear Accelerator, 104, 115, 135, 207 Stanford University, 33, 86, 126, 142, 218n33 Star Wars, 16 stereo equipment, 11, 208 Strategic Defense Initiative, 175–76 Superconducting Super Collider, 3–5, 8–10, 15–16, 170–98, 202, 205–6, 239n43 superconductivity: industrial uses, 11; as constituent field of solid state physics, 110, 164, 167, 235n29, 236n48; incorrectness of theories of, 147; Nobel Prize for, 150, 158; and magnets, 175, 177–79 superfluidity, 6, 156, 158, 162 Sutton, Richard M., 46 synchrotron radiation, 103–4, 198 Szilard, Leo, 88, 209 Tate, John Torrence, 26–27, 51, 79, 91–92 teaching. See pedagogy technological applications. See applications textbooks, 72–73, 90, 124, 136, 227n7 textiles, 24, 85, 218n34 thermodynamics, 6–7, 19, 21, 44, 105 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 18–19 Townes, Charles, 145, 158–59 training. See pedagogy transistor, 11, 54, 72–73, 142–43, 167, 222n64, 232n17 Trivelpiece, Alvin, 175–76 United States Air Force, 108, 110–11, 115, 117, 123

279

United States Congress: and NAL funding, 104; physicists’ testimony before, 111–12, 115, 135, 171–74, 176, 179, 181, 184–86; and SSC funding, 3, 171–192 United States Department of Defense. See Department of Defense United States Department of Energy. See Department of Energy United States Navy. See Office of Naval Research unity: divisions as a threat to, 13, 42, 65, 86; as justification for the SSC, 185– 87; political, 35, 37–38, 40, 56, 70, 73–75; intellectual, 55–56, 70; Physics Today as catalyst for, 80–82, 84; and reductionism, 233n37–38, 239n58 University of Bristol. See Bristol, University of University of California, Santa Barbara. See California, Santa Barbara, University of University of Cambridge. See Cambridge, University of University of Chicago. See Chicago, University of University of Illinois. See Illinois, University of University of Pennsylvania. See Pennsylvania, University of Van Vlack, Lawrence, 124 Van Vleck, John Hasbrook: education, 87, 126; extension of Wigner-Seitz method, 90; impressions of Physical Review, 26; impressions of Physics Today, 83; as leading solid state physicist, 225n53; Nobel Prize, 142–43,

280

INDEX

Van Vleck, John Hasbrook: Nobel Prize (cont.), 150; opposition to APS divisions, 58–63, 65–67, 74–75, 77–78, 80, 88, 204, 219–20nn11–19, 223n4; work on exchange interaction 71; work on magnetism, 96 Vietnam War, 103, 110–13, 133 Waterfall, Wallace, 24, 37–39, 217n15 Weart, Spencer, 55, 95, 154 Weinberg, Alvin, 137–140, 144–45, 147–150 Weinberg criterion, 138–40, 145, 149, 184–85, 187 Weinberg, Steven, 151, 171, 173, 178–79, 182–85, 187, 202 Weisskopf, Victor, 139–40, 144, 183, 232n12

Westfall, Catherine, 10, 103, 197 Westinghouse Electric Corporation, 57, 105, 142–43, 191, 221n28, 227n8 Whewell, William, 30, 33 Wigner–Seitz method, 89, 225n45 Wigner, Eugene, 87–90, 219–20n14, 220n19, 224n33 Wilson, Robert, 115–17, 173, 177 World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War X-ray diffraction, 103, 166 Zeitschrift für Physik, 155, 234n14 Zener, Clarence, 71