January 2008 Newsletter, Vol. 37, No.1
2007 HSS Prize Winners
Kaiser Wins the Pfizer: HSS’s Prestigious Book Award Goes to David Kaiser
The intersection between theoretical physics and visual culture provided David Kaiser with an opportunity to write a book that speaks to the kind of people who often don’t speak to each other: historians, philosophers, sociologists, scientists, and even art historians. “Philosophy of science cares about representation and theory change; sociology about training and making cohorts. For history of science, one way to understand the daily practice of modern physics is by looking at tools and how they are used. We’ve been doing that with physical tools, but not with paper and pencil tools.”
Kaiser won the 2007 Pfizer Prize for Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (University of Chicago Press, 2005). The distant origins of the book lie in his reading of Martin Rudwick’s classic 1976 paper as a second-year physics undergraduate at Dartmouth College. “The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geology, 1760-1840” helped introduce knowledge of the visual to history of science. “It did an amazing job in showing how an image can go from being seen as a useful model to depict the world, to being taken as real in a way that its founders did not intend,” says Kaiser. “In the very beginning of the article, Rudwick says that this sort of thing never happens in the mathematical and physical sciences, but that they are important for the geological sciences. Naomi Oreskes said to me: ‘Is that true?’ I said: ‘What about Feynman diagrams?’ Being a gifted teacher, she replied, ‘Well, what about them?’ (Naomi knows all about ‘teachable moments.’) Thirteen years later, when my book came out, I tried to give her my answer.”
As a high school student, Kaiser was fascinated by popular science writing and the stories of the great scientists. Those stories led him to study and do physics. Joseph Harris, Kaiser’s undergraduate physics advisor – and the kind of person who kept analyses of Italian post-modern fiction on his desk alongside the latest physics journals – sent him off to meet Naomi Oreskes and Rich Kremer, and told him that such people actually made a living as historians of science. Oreskes and Kremer quickly taught Kaiser that history meant much more than the heroic narratives of the popular science genre. Moreover, Oreskes’ example of an historian of science with Ph.D.s in both history and science, and who maintained strong links to her scientific field of geology, gave Kaiser the confidence to do his Ph.D.s in parallel (he applied to three institutions six times). These days Kaiser has dual appointments in the Program in Science, Technology & Society and in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In addition to its own rewards,” says Kaiser, “physics research keeps certain skills sharp that I want to draw on in my historical work.”
Drawing Theories Apart focuses on the mostly informal means of training and teaching in postwar physics and why that was so crucial to getting Feynman diagrams into circulation. Kaiser’s main history advisor in graduate school, Peter Galison, had honed a focus on the daily routines and practices of laboratory life, which helped Kaiser think about theoretical tools such as Feynman diagrams. Kaiser’s first take on an art-historical approach to the diagrams emerged in a term paper he wrote for one of his other advisors, Mario Biagioli. Sam Schweber, Kaiser’s third advisor, was the resident expert on both the physics and history of quantum field theory, out of which Feynman diagrams emerged. Other insights, says Kaiser, came from Andy Warwick and Kathy Olesko, who had both championed pedagogy and training as crucial lenses for understanding how sciences change and develop.
A Ph.D. in physics may have helped clarify some of the technical details, but Kaiser also had to grapple with topics from McCarthyism to art theory. In the last chapter, Kaiser explicitly addresses the art historical theme of why certain pictorial styles persist. “We take for granted linear perspective, yet most art historians will say that it’s a useful artifice and that the style has a history; it had to be accepted and normalized before it became second nature. That was what I was grappling with in Feynman diagrams. They were rejected by physics leaders in the strongest of terms, yet were soon taken up to understand how the world works, and then attributed a realism that neither the innovators nor their first audience recognized or intended.” Kaiser sees a certain irony in the fact that the same theoretical lens used to analyze Renaissance styles and methods of painting is also applied to Feynman’s minimalist line drawings. “Art historians often describe these lush styles of depictions and debate why this or that style persists. But these are beautiful objects of art, not stick figure drawings. I thought art historians would gag on my using their ways of making sense of things. Yet some art historians, like James Elkins, were excited; they felt that mundane or non-artistic images needed to be studied, too.”
Reaching his audience, whether scientists, historians of science, or art historians, is important to Kaiser. In the belief that art historians would not read a book on theoretical physics, Kaiser published his art history argument first in Representations.
“I didn’t include the technical physics parts. Representations told me, ‘We think it’s great, now take all the physics out.’ I thought I had. That was a good lesson in audience.” Kaiser also goes beyond the strictly academic community in his writings for American Scientist and Scientific American. Story is important for these formats, says Kaiser, though there is a growing realization amongst the magazine editors that history can play an important part in the narratives. “Some of these editors are working hard to get critical perspectives as to why certain things happened and to get beyond the old-style grand heroic tales, and are eager for more writing with historical content.” Deciding what to include and, even more critical, what to leave out is a challenge. “It forces me to ask what is important – and it’s often not the picky debates between scientists or scholars – and to also ask whether this would be of interest to more than 10 people. The trick is in how to get across some of the insights that we as a scholarly community have worked so hard for in a format with no footnotes and short wordcounts. It’s a fun challenge.”
Despite the book being solicited by two different publishers, publishing at a time of university press cut backs and shrinking library budgets proved difficult. The book, says Kaiser, almost never came out. At the first press, the book languished for many months with no formal decision, until he was advised to try other presses. After then submitting to the second press, this publisher in turn told him that the book could only be expected to sell 250 copies at most and that it was “too creative and original for us to publish.” “I was starting to sweat; I had been strung along for 20 months,” says Kaiser, “and I needed a book contract to keep my job.” Then Christie Henry from University of Chicago Press called and offered the book a home. “I did my best to pretend on the phone, to say ‘Thanks, I’ll think about it,’ rather than blurting out, ‘Thank God.’” Kaiser offered the “too creative” rejection letter as an advertising blurb for the back cover of the book, but UCP demurred. Though Kaiser laughs about the situation now, at the time it was anything but amusing. “It was pretty serious, and a common story for many friends at my career stage – not always with a happy ending. It’s harder for presses to take a risk on first-time authors, especially in a small field like ours. It speaks to larger themes in the tenure-track process – many tenure decision-makers wrote their first books in a time of plenty, now we are publishing in times of famine, and I often sense a disconnect, with these people not realizing how hard it can be to get published.”
Kaiser is now in the middle of a new book about physics and the cold war and the more formal processes of making physicists. “Post-World War II physics grew faster than any other field in terms of graduate enrollments. This book takes the graduate enrollment curve as a leitmotif – why did people want so many physicists, what did the students want out of a job in physics, and how did people respond in classrooms?”
By Michal Meyer