Joe Martin is a historian at Durham University in the United Kingdom and the author of Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter . And he is also a frequent visitor to AIP. AIP Chief Research Officer Trevor Owens recently interviewed Martin by email as part of a scholar Q&A series he is conducting for the Weekly Edition and Ex Libris Universum , the blog of the AIP Niels Bohr Library and Archives.

Owens: You open Solid State Insurrection with a chapter titled “The pure science ideal and its malcontents.” What is the pure science ideal, who are its malcontents, and why does that history matter?

Martin: In the late nineteenth century, when the likes of John Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Henry Rowland invoked pure science, they meant something like “science pursued with a pure heart.” Rowland especially was concerned that what he saw as a focus on short-term financial goals in American culture made it harder to do the sort of curiosity-driven research that he admired in European physics, and so fought hard for ways to support pure science—the American Physical Society among them.

But the implied slur didn’t go unnoticed. The opposite of “pure” isn’t really “applied”—it’s “impure.” One consequence of this rhetoric was that a whole class of scientists and engineers were dismissed as intellectually lesser. Those individuals felt alienated from the APS and founded many of the societies—like the Acoustical Society of America, Optical Society of America (now Optica), and Society of Rheology—that now make up the AIP federation .

As a result, assumptions about what the core of physics really was were crucial as the American physics community established itself and built the institutions that would serve it. As physics grew through the twentieth century, it did so within an institutional system that was assembled in response to those turn-of-the-century debates about pure science, and so they continued to matter, even when physicists started to prefer words like “basic” and “fundamental” instead of “pure.”

Owens: Early in the book you suggest that “physics is what physicists decide it is.” Could you talk about how boundaries between fields in the physical sciences and engineering developed and evolved in this history?

Martin: “Science is what scientists do” is an old slogan. Historians use it, or versions of it, to emphasize the human dimensions of science. By replacing “do” with “decide,” I was aiming to emphasize that what we call science, or physics, is the product of decisions made by people, which might have been made differently. The story of “pure science” is a nice example of that. It was an attempt to keep some things in and to force other things out—to sharpen the distinction between science and engineering, among other goals.

The birth of “solid state physics” was, I think, a crucial moment, because it emerged from an intentional effort to use the power physicists had over the boundaries of their field to accomplish some well-defined goals. In the case of pure science, the people advocating for it believed they were just trying to arrange things in the way that was natural. The effort to build solid state physics, though, recognized that disciplines are contingent and sometimes temporary arrangements.

That attitude became critical for the way the physical sciences were organized. Since then, we’ve seen a great many more fields—nanotechnology, materials science, complex systems, and so on—that exist not because people thought “this is an independent feature of the world and we need a field of study to represent it,” but because they thought “this category will incentivize us to organize our labor in a way that’s useful for accomplishing our aims.”

Owens: You reference ten different archival collections from AIP’s Niels Bohr Library and Archives, including records of AIP Directors Elmer Hutchisson and William Koch , records of the American Physical Society , records of the Physics Today Division , and the personal papers of Karl Darrow . What is it about AIP’s archival collections that made them particularly useful and relevant for the kind of research you engage in?

Martin: As an institutional historian, I’m committed to the proposition that the structures used to organize the work of doing science are crucial for understanding how that work gets done. American physics grew incredibly rapidly after World War II, and organizing that rapid growth, be it through societies, meetings, journals, or other institutional apparatus became proportionally more important as it did so.

The AIP collections were so central to the project because the materials they hold reveal the details of how the decisions that guided that growth were made. Organizations are reflections of community values, so any records that help historians better understand how organizations were established, grew, and changed are invaluable for helping to understand the development of those values.

Owens: You engage with a wide range of articles from Physics Today throughout the book. For example, Vannevar Bush’s 1948 “Trends in American science,” Victor Weisskopf’s 1967 “Nuclear structure and modern research,” and Philip Anderson’s 1991 “Is Complexity Physics? Is It Science? What Is It?” What is it about Physics Today that makes it a useful resource for a historian of science like yourself? (Physics Today is an AIP publication.)

Martin: Physics Today was launched as an effort to unite the physics community in the post-World War II years, when many were worried that it was fragmenting. And the editorial team did a great job of turning it into a forum in which the community aired out many of the professional issues that really animated people. Reading those early issues is like eavesdropping at a water cooler. Points of view are out in the open and discussions frank. And because it got such a wide distribution, going out to all members of AIP societies, we can assume that anything that appeared there was widely read, and probably discussed.

Sources like that are great for historians because they occupy a scale between formal scientific publications, which we can access but which doesn’t reveal much about the nitty gritty of community disagreements, and informal discussion, which are much more detailed and textured but which we often can’t access at all. That is, they’re a window into the motives that drive decisions that are difficult to discern from more official sources. And because Physics Today was such an active forum, it’s a fabulous place to look to find out more about what was happening behind the scenes.

Owens: You were back at AIP’s Niels Bohr Library and Archives recently to consult some additional collections, so it would also be great if you could share a bit about some of the ways you are using our collections to support some of your current research projects.

Martin: I’ve used AIP collections recently for two projects. The first is a history of soft matter physics, which is an extension of the work on solid state and a collaboration with the soft matter physicist Wilson Poon at Edinburgh. When I started researching the history of solid state physics in 2008, it was still more or less active as a subfield. But by the time the book came out in 2018, it was on its way out. You still see courses in solid state, mostly dealing with electronic and magnetic structure of crystalline solids, but you’re not likely to meet many people who would self-identify as solid state physicists anymore. Condensed matter is now the preferred nomenclature, and even that is fragmenting into other specialties.

Soft matter is one of those. It focuses on “soft” systems, which are easily deformable at room temperature. To become a distinct field, it drew together a number of longstanding research programs, including polymers, colloids, gels, liquid crystals, granular materials, and rheology, taking advantage of the focus that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s on critical phenomena—and AIP holds records detailing the evolving institutional homes of those research areas. It’s one of those fields investigating the still-mysterious world of everyday objects, and is fascinating as an area of physics that has built rich interconnections with chemistry, biology, and engineering.

Second, I’m investigating the firing of Allen V. Astin, director of the National Bureau of Standards, in 1953. The new secretary of commerce for the Eisenhower administration pushed him out on the pretext that the bureau had been “insufficiently objective” when testing and condemning an after-market additive for car batteries. The American scientific community pushed back against political interference in the bureau’s affairs and succeeded in getting Astin reinstated.

The story is both rich and timely, since it deals with the political importance of science and political engagement of scientists, as well as raising a host of interesting questions about how the bureau concluded that a battery additive was ineffective at improving battery life—harder than it sounds—and how they communicated their conclusions. The relevant AIP papers include the papers of John Van Vleck , who was a member of the NBS Visiting Committee.

Trevor Owens
American Institute of Physics
towens@aip.org

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