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History

When physicists reigned supreme

03 Aug 2005

It is seductively easy for physicists to think that physics has always been the most important science. But the subject only achieved this primacy just a little over 100 years ago. Physics laboratories and physics research only became commonplace in the late 19th century, when many of today’s fundamental concepts in thermodynamics, electricity and radiation became accepted parts of the subject. It was only then that the “physicist” became a recognizable figure in the world of science, with systems of specialized training, career development and professional recognition. Physics also became recognized as the key not just to the secrets of nature, but to the products of industrial and military innovation too.

But 19th-century physics was also remarkably different from its modern incarnation. It concerned itself with a mysterious, all-pervading and (as Michelson and Morley found out) impossible-to-detect ether, through which forces, radiation and matter manifested themselves. Many of its practitioners were concerned not with abstract truth or fundamental knowledge, but with understanding nature in metaphysical or theological terms. Others were devising spectacular demonstrations of “natural” effects to earn a living. Still others had interests in spiritualism and psychical research. Physicists were also public intellectual figures, engaging in political and economic debate.

Over the last 20 years our understanding of the history of physics has been transformed. Historians no longer regard physics as a self-evidently progressive enterprise directed towards our current understanding of nature. Instead, they have come to see physics as the outcome of a complex process of “cultural persuasion”, in which physicists work hard to persuade the public that they have useful expertise and that physics counts for something. Many detailed studies document how physics slowly and painstakingly came to achieve its cultural and intellectual authority – from Michael Faraday’s public lectures at the Royal Institution in London to the role of the Cavendish Laboratory in creating international electrical standards.

Drawing on the very best of this work, Iwan Rhys Morus from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, charts the transformation of natural philosophy into physics and its rise to international scientific pre-eminence by the end of the 19th century. In a beautifully written and engaging synthesis, Morus sheds new light on familiar topics and people like Faraday, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James Clerk Maxwell. He focuses on trust and credibility as the keys to understanding how and why physics acquired its intellectual authority. The result is by far the best history of 19th-century physics that is now available.

Beginning with the use of Newtonian science by Laplace and others in France in the early 19th-century, Morus charts the relationships between natural philosophy, mathematical physics and politics. He explores how analytical ideas that had been developed in France were imported into Cambridge mathematics by Charles Babbage and others. He also examines the emergence of research institutes in German universities, which saw physics divided between experiment and theory in a way that continues to today.

Another important strand in early 19th-century physical science was romanticism, which developed as a reaction to mechanistic Newtonian science. People like Friedrich Schelling, Humphrey Davy and his friend the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought there might be an underlying unity in what they saw as an animate organic nature. Such ideas motivated attempts to link physical forces such as electricity and magnetism – culminating, of course, with Faraday’s work at the Royal Institution in the 1820s and 1830s. It was from these ideas that the new concepts of “energy” and “work” – as well as thermodynamics – emerged.

Emphasizing the links between science, the state, and economic and cultural development, Morus neatly shows how thermodynamics was intimately related to the new technology of steam power. Thermodynamics allowed a new breed of physicists like William Thomson to understand, control and gain intellectual credibility in their industrial society. But with its implications for geology, evolution and theology – as well as its catastrophic prediction of the “heat death” of the universe – it also provided a cosmological model for understanding the history and future of the Earth, thereby giving physics a place in fundamental scientific and cultural debates.

Other physicists, meanwhile, were transforming electricity from a source of spectacle and wonder into a practical, working technology – from electroplating and telegraphy to electric light and power. This put physicists and electrical engineers at the centre of the action. Yet electricity was still a source of mystery, and it was experiments on gas discharges that led some physicists – Oliver Lodge among them – to wonder if the nebulous glow of the discharge represented a new state of matter and a possible link with the world of spirits. Ironically, it was such experiments that led to the discovery of X-rays and the electron, which underpinned the development of micro-physics in the 20th century.

What this book shows is that 19th-century physics was a much more diverse and interesting enterprise than is usually thought. Through the division of labour, the factory-style organization of institutions, and the shared moral and economic values of work and efficiency, Morus argues, physics as we now understand it was very much a product of the 19th-century industrial culture. Material and cultural resources – money, equipment, labs, training, professional bodies and good public relations – were needed by physicists to do their work and make it scientifically and culturally credible.

In emphasizing professional credibility and trust, Morus’s argument perhaps offers lessons for physicists today, when the hard-won achievements and authority of physics are breaking down and the “king of sciences” is being dethroned.

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