Artful Physics

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Notes

¹The conclusion seems to be an artefact of the instances under review. It is hard to imagine an analogous situation in non-unitary, multi-lingual, decentralized States such as Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and Canada which, to judge only by Nobel prizes, are not the least innovative of countries.

²George Sarton, A History of Science: Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece (Cambridge, MA, 1952), p. xiii.

³Paul Forman, ‘Into Quantum Electronics: The Maser as “Gadget” of Cold-War America’, in National Military Establishments and the Advancement of Science and Technology, edited by Paul Forman and José M. Sánchez Ron, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 180, (Dordrecht, 1996), pp. 261–326.

⁴My own writings on the exact sciences and imperialism indicate the insularity of physics—the trans-national integrity of the discipline—a conclusion that postmodernists find unsettling. Lewis Pyenson, ‘Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences Revisited’, Isis, 84 (1993), 103–108; ‘Imperium in Imperio: The Natural History of Natural Knowledge’, Historia Scientiarum, 10, no. 1 (2000), 1–15; ‘History of Science’, in Science, Technology, and Society, edited by Sal Restivo (New York, 2005), pp. 1486–92.

⁵The introductory epigram for Drawing Theories Apart, a testimonial for physicist Percy Bridgman, emphasizes Bridgman's use of theory as ‘a set of tools’ (p. v). Bridgman's philosophy of ‘operational analysis’ is found in the approach of some Feynman diagrammers, although David Kaiser does not develop the theme.

⁶David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York, 2001).

⁷Albert Einstein, ‘Motives for Research,’ in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 7, English Translation, translated by Alfred Engel and Engelbert Schucking (Princeton, NJ, 2002), pp. 41–45 (p. 43).

⁸Albert Einstein, ‘The Common Element in Artistic and Scientific Experience’, ibid, p. 207.

⁹Lewis Pyenson, ‘History of Physics’, in Encyclopedia of Physics, edited by Rita G. Lerner and George L. Trigg (Weinheim, 2005), pp. 1024–44.

¹⁰Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, translated by Nicholas Walker, edited by Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 3–53, (pp. 34, 37, 39, 47, 48–49, 52 in sequence).