Do electrons care about Feynman?
Our chief consultant explores an unexpected feature of scientific magazines.
Our chief consultant writes:
There’s a class of scientific magazines in between the technical journals (like the Astronomical Journal or Physical Review D) and the popular ones (like Smithsonian). The first kind publish articles by and for specialists, focused on new results in the science; the latter interpret science for laymen. The in-between journals, including the news sections of Science and Nature, assume a certain knowledge of science but are less narrowly focused on current research. They often explore scientific history, recent and older, and often profile personalities. Very often, we realized while leafing through some old issues.
Of course scientists can be interested in history like anyone else, and curious about how things came to be. And being human they can have a taste for personalities, even gossip. But it struck our group of consultants that the articles on Feynman, Einstein, Heisenberg and all bordered on hero-worship at times. And at times slipped over. We didn’t expect this. Science is supposed to be objective, after all; it shouldn’t matter who worked out the equations of General Relativity; it only matters whether they’re right or not. Why should a practicing physicist care about some discussion Bohr and Heisenberg had back in the 1920s, especially if both turned out to be wrong? And why should we marvel at the insights of Einsten in his marvellous year of 1905?
Well, descriptions of history can be useful because putting yourself in a different time and place, with different assumptions and ideas, is one way to think in a new way about where we are now. Science is about making progress, which means somehow you have to break out of today. But I think the scientific “cult of personality” has a deeper reason.
It’s because science, for all its objectivity, is at the heart an amazingly creative pursuit. Gathering data is tedious and painstaking; calculating results, a long worry about bugs in the code; testing a theory, a hard process in which you have to supress your hopes and fears. But somewhere, sometime, someone has to come up with an idea no one has thought before. And it has to be right. So it’s much harder, in this respect, than being creative in art or literature: it may be a wonderful idea, but if it doesn’t work out it has to be thrown away. So scientists have an enormous respect for people who have been scientifically creative successfully. They know how hard it is.
