Spencer Weart and his History of Science
For a historian, Spencer Weart has a surprising tendency to focus on the issues of today. His work spans sunspots and global warmingFF archives and education, modern physics and nuclear fears. Director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, he will retire in January 2009 after a 35-year career at the AIP.
Weart’s own career took him from doing physics to understanding the cultural resonances of nuclear technologies and to a sweeping survey of the history of climate change. After a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Colorado and a post-doctoral stint in solar physics at Caltech, NASA offered Weart a job building a solar telescope, which he turned down (just as well, he notes, as the solar telescope was delayed for 30 years). Weart was faced with either finding a physics position outside the unpromising field of solar physics or returning to school. He chose Berkeley and the history of science. “What the hell, I always enjoyed doing history,” says Weart. “I took a chance and it worked out. I was born in 1942, so I could afford to take a few years and slip in before the baby boomers started filling the job market.”
The first sign of his changed circumstances was the loss of access to the machine tools and screws of the physics department’s stock room, and thus an inability to fix his bike. Of more importance were the cultural differences. “In physics, departments doors are always open; in history departments, doors are closed.” Roger Hahn, one of Weart’s teachers at Berkeley, described it to him thus: “In physics, different lines of inquiry attract one another; in history they repel one another.” Despite some cooperative history of science work, including a statistics project with John Heilbron and Paul Forman, Weart says the cooperative spirit of the physics community does not adapt well to history of science.
One historically useful aspect of his background is the general physical knowledge Weart brings to subjects such as climate science. “Beyond that, physics encourages you to generalize and to look for evidence – to test and not to fool yourself, so you can come out with general conclusions without getting carried away.” This approach helped Weart in Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (1988), a psychosocial and sociological analysis of the irrational components of human relationships with nuclear energy. “It’s quite extraordinary how many hooks latch on to very deep things – monsters and mad scientists and the end of the world, death rays and life rays and weapons.”
Weart expected his work on climate change (The Discovery of Global Warming, 2003, updated 2008) to provide similar hooks, but found little. Despite the Cold War’s end, nuclear fear – now, via terrorism – remains potent (a second, up-to-date edition of Nuclear Fear will appear in 2010). “If you take away the nuclear aspect, it is not clear that 9/11 would have had anything like the impact it did have. Weapons of mass destruction are supposed to include nuclear, biological and chemical, but biological and chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction, they’re weapons of mass mortality.” Studies of Google hits on linked words such as “terrorist” and “nuclear” compared with “terrorist” and “poison” give much greater numbers to the former.
Global warming is not completely bereft of deep symbolism. “It’s not by accident that the rising sea level – which isn’t going to affect most people in the present century – is nevertheless the one people talk about the most. The city being flooded has a deep, old resonance.” Weart is both amused and bemused by the choice of the polar bear as global warming’s iconic image – a completely fearless land predator that regards humans as nothing but food. “To most people global warming affects polar bears and, maybe, the inhabitants of Pacific Islands.”
Weart’s research has taken him beyond the history of science and physics. Sparked by his work on radicals and nuclear opponents for Nuclear Fear, Weart began to wonder about the term “better red than dead,” and its ideological implication that communist countries did not war against each other. “By the 1970s we knew that communist countries went to war with one another, so that was a false thing to say, and of course democracies fight each other, too… then I stopped to think: when do democracies ever go to war with one another?”
While teaching part-time at Princeton, Weart buttonholed other historians to ask if they knew of any warring democracies. They all shook their heads. A year later he found a small group of political scientists studying the topic, with Michael Doyle, one of the pioneers, working in the political science department at Princeton. “Talk about the ghettoization of scholarly fields,” Weart says, adding that when he gave seminars on what became his book – Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (1998) – he was introduced not as a historian doing political science, but as a physicist doing political science. “That sounded far more prestigious to the political scientists.”
Weart joined the Center for History of Physics in 1974. “It was fun to go up to any great physicist with a tape recorder and say, ‘tell me all about your life.’ Scientists are underappreciated; they get Nobel Prizes but that doesn’t mean their grandchildren ask them, ‘What did you do grandpa?’”
The History Center, established in 1965 and developed by Charles Weiner and Joan Warnow, was created by physicists with a dual motive: to preserve their history and to publicize it, so that, as Weart says, “the public would appreciate them more.”
“There was a kind of leverage model: we would save the material, scholars would use it to write books, journalists and teachers would read them, and they would be presented to students. Then the Internet came along and we could skip all that and go directly to the public.”
Physicists remain a major audience, and while much of the History Center’s funding comes directly through the AIP, individual physicists will also donate money. “Physicists don’t take an instrumental attitude; they just think history is a good thing and that the memory of what they did and what their teachers and their colleagues did should not be lost.” And physicists on the whole, says Weart, are fascinated by their own history. “Physics’ impact on humans thinking about their place in the universe has been profound; there is a tradition of having a deep engagement with religious questions. Darwinism engages with the Bible, but not in deeper religious questions – Spinoza’s questions – to the same extent as physics.”
Yet no one is calling for Newtonianism to be banned in schools. Not so fast, says Weart. “The anti-Darwinists range from people who don’t like the idea that we’re descended from apes and the struggle for survival to Young Earth creationists. These people have a lot of trouble with astronomers, geologists, and with the whole range of physical sciences. You hear controversies over the age of the Grand Canyon and over radioactive dating; these are sub rosa battles being fought out over Darwinian evolution, but if, for some reason, people were able to teach pure Creationism, they would very quickly find themselves in conflict with the entire physical science community.”
Weart’s online work on global warming for the History Center (http://www.aip.org/history/climate) dwarfs his book on the subject. “Probably more people read the Web site – or at least visit it – in a week than have ever read the book. I get e-mail responses from people saying, ‘I find your site useful for giving me arguments to use against skeptics’; or ‘the historical approach gives me a good insight into the science’; or ‘you’re nuts; don’t you realize that carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it settles down to the surface and can’t possibly be causing the greenhouse effect.’” At approximately 450,000 words, the site is a scholarly work with thousands of footnotes, references, and hyperlinks between essays, the latter especially useful since many of the researchers in climate science remained unaware of each other’s work until recently.
His science background gives Weart the ballast to go beyond historical discussion and into the rapids of political activism. In a personal note on the global warming section of the Center for History’s Web site, he wrote:
“In short: individuals can and should do two things (as I have done). Cut back your greenhouse gas emissions. And at appropriate times let your political representatives know that your vote will be swayed by their actual activity – not meaningless lip service – to push for serious action against global warming.”
Plenty of work remains to be done in the history of physics; even internalism is not tapped out, believes Weart, though opportunities are limited. While a barely dug field awaits historians of some recent physics, the sheer technical difficulty is overwhelming. “If you do know enough about particle theory and string theory to write it up, no one can understand it except string theorists; even the average physicist can’t.” Other fields within physics – such as cosmology – are less technically difficult and can be mined by historians of science, but Weart adds that journalists, rather than historians, dominate. Solid state physics has also been neglected, probably, says Weart, “because it doesn’t have the philosophical resonance of quantum mechanics and relativity. It doesn’t have the fascination that can interest you, and interest your students, and be written up for the general public.”
Apart from continuing to work on the History Center’s Web site, Weart’s future includes travel, preferably to places not already overrun with tourists and development. “When my father was born there were about a billion people; when I was born there were maybe three billion, there are six billion now. This has been a driving force behind a lot of my work – the great historic changes we’re involved in now. We can’t support nine billion people in the style to which we ought to be accustomed. The choices are fairly simple in how the population comes down: we can do it rationally through birth control and through living frugally, or we can kill each other through nuclear war or trashing our environment.
“It’s too late to go back to hoeing the fields; the only way through this is with better science, including nanotechnology and genetic engineering. The human race is still going to be around 500,000 years from now, but the state of the human race is going to depend on whether we mobilize scientific research and technology in the next 50 to 100 years. I think history of science has a role to play by showing scientists and the public how this enterprise works, warts and all.” History of science, says Weart, must be part of the R&D of the business of scientific research.
– by Michal Meyer