Physicists, culture

Furthermore, the supervisor and his two students appeared to share similar views on the relations of the new quantum mechanics to chemistry. At the end of 1929 Fowler, who was one of the editors for Cambridge University Press, asked London whether he would be interested to write a book on the foundations of chemistry in quantum mechanics . [18] Dirac during the same year had, as we saw, expressed his view about chemistry, which would permanently mark the physicists culture. By 1931, Fowler was already expressing a subtler view of the whole problem. In a report... 

Dirac s 1929 pronouncement encapsulated what was already part of the physicists culture for many decades. And, with Dirac s specific contributions to the development of quantum mechanics, it became possible to artictrlate this reductionist program Chemistry after the Heitler-London paper could be perceived as being the different manifestations of spin, and spin, after all, was under the jurisdiction of the physicists. And though physicists believed that the new quantum mechanics had also taken care of chemistry, the chemists themselves did not appear to have been under any panic that their identity was being transformed and they were being turned into physicists. 

Compared with physicists, these chemists expressed a different culture when it came to formulate a theory and to impose their demands on such a theory—such as the constitutive and regulatory role of empirical data in theory building. Can one, then, pose the question whether reductionism may not be independent of the subculture of chemists and physicists Is it the case that the question up to now has been formulated almost exclusively in terms of the physicists culture Different scientific communities impose different explanatory demands on their theories, and this constitutes an important cultural characteristic of each community. It may, perhaps, be the case that the formulation of many of the philosophical issues in the different scientific (sub)disciplines is dependent on the specific cultural characteristics of the particular communities that comprise the practitioners of each of these (sub)disci-plines. And, it may thus be the case that the discussion of these issues may be greatly enriched through such a perspective when the history of the (sub)disciplines does not only come to the fore in order to clarify theoretical or technical issues, but also in order to articulate practices and cultural strands. 

Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan. In Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering. Chicago The University of Chicago Press. 429-64. 

It seems to have taken a long time to realize that these two branches of X-ray physics can profitably be integrated in XDI [1], What factors were of importance in prompting the synthesis of XDI from XRD and X-ray imaging There has traditionally been a cultural divide separating physicists active in the fields of X-ray imaging on the one... 

If the absence of women from the applicant pool is the observable, what is the mechanism I would postulate that the problem lies with departmental and scientific culture, which in turn exists within this huge bubble of our societal culture. Wolf-laureate Chien-Shiung Wu, a physicist who arguably should have gotten a Nobel Prize but didn t, addressed that point before she died I sincerely doubt that any open-minded person really believes in the faulty notion that women have no intellectual capacity for science and technology.21 Nor do I believe that social and economic factors are the actual obstacles that prevent women s participation in scientific and technical fields. The main stumbling block in the way of any progress is and always has been unimpeachable tradition. 22 This observation came from a... 

Consider physicist John Tyndall, who in 1895 idly but accurately noted the antibacterial action of a certain bluish-green mold. Almost 50 years later, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming made precisely the same observation when he left a bacteria culture uncovered eutd found it contaminated by the same mold. The difference was that Mr. Fleming knew he had discovered something important and followed through. The result Penicillin. 

Oppenheimer s mother died after a long battle with leukemia in late 1931 that was when he announced himself to Herbert Smith, his former Ethical Culture teacher, to be the loneliest man in the world. His father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1937. The two deaths frame the beginning years of the unworldly physicist s discovery of the suffering in the world. Later he testified to the surprise of that discovery ... 

While the collection of chemical facts continued to be enlarged by the artisan, these facts were interpreted by the philosophers— who also served as mathematicians, astronomers, anatomists, and physicists, as well as theologians and political theoreticians. In fact not until the 1800s did European scientists begin to think of their work as separate from that of philosophers. Though philosophy is common to all cultures, the most influential in the development of modern chemistry were the philosophers of Greece. These thinkers derived hypotheses about the nature of matter and material interactions that helped and hindered chemical developments over the next 2000 years. 

This birth of philosophic modernism in Vienna is odd, in a certain way. Vienna s recent philosophical tradition was above all empiricist, rationalist, and positivist, as the prominence of the physicist and empirico-positivist philosopher Ernst Mach and his followers testifies.For cultural-historical reasons, the human sciences in Austria were not saturated with Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, as was the case in Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe, and Austrian philosophy steered strongly away from the metaphysical. Part of the power of the Tractatus is the way in which it feels its way through this steely positivism to lyrical metaphysical and, indeed, mystical insights. 

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