THE SHIFTING TERRAIN OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

There’s an importance to convey why we ask these questions so relentlessly, why we can seem so consumed and even obsessive; why we always have to come back to the public one way or another to ask for more resources to support what becomes very expensive scientific research, to convey why we think it matters, what we think we’re after, and to convey it in a variety of forms for our fellow specialists, our budding students who are going to learn so much more than we’ll ever know, and for our fellow readers and citizens. We scientists and historians have an obligation or responsibility to explain as clearly as we can why we think that’s a worthwhile endeavor. Those all call for different kinds of writing, different scales of an argument, different techniques for composition, but they’re all important. I’ve enjoyed trying to practice and get a little more experienced in each of those domains.

I have a couple of questions that are on my mind these days. One of the things that I find helpful as an historian of science is tracing through what questions have risen to prominence in scientific or intellectual communities in different times and places. It’s fun to chase down the answers, the competing solutions, or suggestions of how the world might work that lots of people have worked toward in the past. But I find it interesting to go after the questions that they were asking in the first place. What counted as a legitimate scientific question or subject of inquiry? And how have the questions been shaped and framed and buoyed by the immersion of those people asking questions in the real world?

One example that’s still on my mind is this question of what to do about quantum theory. Quantum theory is by any measure our most successful scientific theory in the history of humankind, going back as long as we choose to go back. Predictions using the equations of quantum theory can be formulated in some instances out to exponential accuracy. We can now use fancy computer routines to make predictions for the behavior of little bits of matter, like electrons and other subatomic particles, and make predictions for their properties out to eleven, twelve, or thirteen decimal places. It’s an extraordinary level of precision. And then other enterprising researchers can subject those predictions to measurement on actual electrons in a real laboratory and check the answers. The measured results and the theoretical predictions in some of these instances will match out to a part per trillion, to one part in 10¹². By these kinds of measures, quantum theory is just unbelievably powerful and impressive. And yet, as a story about nature, the conceptual picture that quantum theory seems to suggest is very far from clear. It’s been far from clear now for about a century. It’s not that no one has any idea; it’s that lots of people have lots of ideas. To this day, there’s a real contest of people trying to make sense of what these impeccable equations imply about how the world works.

All that is to say that this is now a topic of ongoing interest and attention among researchers around the world in virtually every continent. And yet, that basic question—what does quantum theory tell us about how the world works?—was ruled out of court as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry for large periods of time over the century that we’ve been grappling with quantum theory.

We have this paradox where everyone agrees that quantum theory is this crowning achievement, but what do we do with it? What kinds of questions is it legitimate to even pose about it? Those have not always been so uniformly pursued, welcomed, or even acknowledged. Why did certain questions or aspects of that topic come into focus, even get tackled by leading members of the field? And why was it at other times seen as something to be pushed aside? And then by force, we have to begin broadening our inquiry. It’s not only about the force of individual personalities or the grandeur of certain ideas. We start having to ask about things like the embeddedness of this enterprise in a very real and shifting human world—in a world of specific institutions and shifting geopolitics, lots of things about the broader framing within which we try to learn about nature. Those start to help us make sense of this shifting terrain of which questions get counted as legitimate. I find that constellation of heady ideas and how the embedding of those concepts and questions becomes a much more historical, much more human story, endlessly fun and very fascinating.

It’s interesting to reflect on the uncertainties that we’re facing amid the Covid-19 crisis. Many of us now are unavoidably stuck in the midst of an irreducible uncertainty that many people aren’t very comfortable with. On one hand, as a physicist and someone who’s been looking at the history of physics for a long time, quantum physicists have been grappling with the implications of Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle for nearly a hundred years. We’ve become accustomed to necessary trade-offs. We could try to learn a lot about one thing, but necessarily know nothing whatsoever about some paired quantity. What does that do for our notion of how the world works, about making predictions for what will happen tomorrow or the next day?

On one hand, quantum physicists have a professional immersion in uncertainty. On the other hand, I don’t know that we’re so much better prepped to deal with, say, the Covid-19 situation than many other people, by which I mean the following: We can use our equations of quantum theory, for example, with the uncertainty principle baked in at the start to make very definite statements or predictions about how the world should work (at least under carefully controlled laboratory conditions). Then we can perform not just one or two measurements, but tens of thousands on systems that we prepare in the same way. We can test ideas to very high statistical significance. So, we can say that the world goes like this and not like that, at least not like that to one part in a million or one part in a trillion. That level of being able to frame a question carefully, go out and poke the world in clean laboratory conditions and try to sift through gobs and gobs of data points to get some real bedrock confidence in the outcomes—that’s not the world we’re in these days.

For all the talk about conceptual uncertainty and the uncertainty principle itself, there’s on one hand a familiarity with not just uncertainty, but with probabilities, with being limited to making probabilistic predictions for the future. That’s an analogy to where we all are these days with the course of the pandemic and how the world might eventually reopen. On the other hand, physicists, with our luxury of quantification and precision, are not in that sense much better off than most anyone else these days.

I am an historian of science. I write books and articles, I go to archives, I interview people, and I try to put together arguments and interpretations of events from the past that help us inform ourselves about the present. I publish in history journals, I train history students, and I love it. I’m also a member of the Physics Department at MIT. I teach physics courses and I advise a research group in physics, so I get to wear more than one hat.

The field of history of science has been a terrific professional and intellectual home for me for a long time. Most historians of science consider themselves historians first. That is to say, we want to craft compelling interpretations and arguments about the past, about why and how things have changed in human history. Our focus is on efforts to try to make sense of the world, what we would now call scientific research. It’s gone by other names in times gone by—the fields of natural philosophy, or natural history, or other terms that were once more commonly used. How has that inquiry unfolded? How has it changed? How has it been embedded in a sometimes much broader human society and been buffeted by politics, culture, and institutions?

Most historians of science, certainly these days, consider themselves historians. That means we use historical methods of research. We comb through the published literature, investigate unpublished things—correspondence, notes, notebooks, grant proposals. For more recent periods, we interview people. (There’s a colleague of mine who likes to say that the historian’s job is reading dead people’s mail, which captures a lot of what we try to do.) We are trying to figure out the texture of lived experience and how that informed the people about whose world we’re trying to get our heads back into. On one hand, it is an interpretive effort squarely within the humanities and social sciences to make sense of our world in times and places gone by. With the history of science, we get to have this productive, ongoing discussion with much more contemporary events and efforts in the sciences today. Why do certain ideas take hold and become so prominent? Why do certain questions rise to prominence and get asked in one setting versus another? These are the larger questions about the present-day scientific enterprise that a lot of work in the history of science can help us better understand.

There’s a long history of researchers trying to relate their work to broader audiences for different motivations, using different media and techniques. Historians of science have learned a lot about science communication among fellow scientists. That’s an example where some of the insights from historians of science might be valuable even to this day. In my own work, I get to play with these ideas from recent physics in a few different ways: I conduct historical research; I do comb through dead people’s mail and sometimes live people’s mail; I get to interview people. A lot of my historical work is from fairly recent times, so I get to talk with people more directly in email and so on. But I am also a physicist and conduct physics research for physicists’ sakes. I consider myself lucky to get to play with ideas that themselves have been bumping along in different ways and been seen from many different angles in different times and places.

On one hand, the historical work doesn’t tell me what to do today when I wear my physicist’s cap, but it does sometimes give me an appreciation for how certain questions have been posed, or maybe unforeseen trends that might bubble up if we change our view and take a look from a different angle. In that sense, I get to play with contemporary questions about, in my case, theoretical physics.

One of the things that historians can do even for contemporary scientific research is not to offer a better candidate answer—I don’t think that’s something to look for from the historical record or from historians themselves—but they can help remind us of questions or methods that had once ignited the imaginations of prior generations. Some of the questions have a much longer shelf life, let’s say, than the proposed answers. Some answers look great a century on, and we’re delighted to put them in our textbooks and teach them to our students. We know, however, that in general most answers are going to look foolish or more often just irrelevant after a rather modest passage of time.

Focusing on the leading scientific suggestions of today has value, but it’s limited. Instead, one of the tasks historians can do is remind us of the questions that had once seemed so urgent. We will see the question from a different light today than before, but there can be an intergenerational continuity, a genuine intellectual value for chasing down the connections among the questions, even more so than worrying too much about the proposed answers, which we know are going to have a much shorter shelf life.

I’ve been thinking in recent years about writing about the recent history of science and the many kinds of people we might be able to engage with such writing, or hopefully even excite or sometimes inspire. What are the kinds of venues for that? What are the styles? What might click with one audience and maybe not quite land with another? I’ve been trying to think more explicitly about the craft of writing itself. In my career, I’ve written a book with a big trade press, I’ve written books with university presses, I’ve written books that were specialist monographs within university presses. Beyond the monograph, beyond the book, I’ve enjoyed being able to write for a variety of magazines and newspapers and broader audience venues— shorter essays, op-eds, and so on. The genre of the essay is a classic form; it’s not like it was just invented recently. There are some people who make it look so easy. They’re just such natural essayists. There are people who can capture complicated ideas full of human drama and struggle and convey that in a way that respects their readers, but doesn’t expect the reader already to be an expert in the topic.

I have my personal favorites, and I think we’re all inspired by writers like that. I’ve been trying to think more about what kind of communication might be successful with different readers and excite different conversations. It’s dearly important to be able to write the focused monograph for my colleagues in the history of science or students who are going to encounter a textbook, and that has to have lots and lots of endnotes and all the so-called scholarly apparatus. It’s equally as important to be able to write both books and articles for broader groups of readers for whom this might be the only thing they ever read about black holes, or the Big Bang, or quantum entanglement, or for whom they would read this and then maybe be curious to read a few more things even though they’re not going to make a career in theoretical physics.

One thing that I find helpful in thinking about writing, especially for that larger, more mixed heterogeneous group, is thinking about humans. So many of the ideas that I am frankly obsessed with in my own research, both as an historian and also as a physicist, concern scales that are so different, so strange or distant from the human scale. I do a lot of work on quantum theory with colleagues—on super fancy, crazy fun tests of quantum entanglement. I also work on cosmology and the grand sweep of the universe from the Big Bang to today—very dramatic cosmic processes in astrophysics. Neither of these are easy to convey to people who aren’t trained in physics or in highly quantitative patterns of thought. So, what I find helpful is to bring humans into these accounts by trying to craft some careful metaphors and analogies.

There’s a human element to the investigation into how we even came to ask those questions or muddle toward our answers. There are ways that convey some of the intellectual, conceptual heft about processes in the world that we’ve now come to learn quite a lot about, but to bring it to a human scale to convey what we think the stakes are, what genuinely keeps us up at night and gets us out of bed in the morning.

There’s an importance to convey why we ask these questions so relentlessly, why we can seem so consumed and even obsessive; why we always have to come back to the public one way or another to ask for more resources to support what becomes very expensive scientific research, to convey why we think it matters, what we think we’re after, and to convey it in a variety of forms for our fellow specialists, our budding students who are going to learn so much more than we’ll ever know, and for our fellow readers and citizens. We scientists and historians have an obligation or responsibility to explain as clearly as we can why we think that’s a worthwhile endeavor. Those all call for different kinds of writing, different scales of an argument, different techniques for composition, but they’re all important. I’ve enjoyed trying to practice and get a little more experienced in each of those domains.

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Most historians of science, certainly these days, consider themselves historians. That means we use historical methods of research. We comb through the published literature, investigate unpublished things—correspondence, notes, notebooks, grant proposals. For more recent periods, we interview people. (There’s a colleague of mine who likes to say that the historian’s job is reading dead people’s mail, which captures a lot of what we try to do.) We are trying to figure out the texture of lived experience and how that informed the people about whose world we’re trying to get our heads back into. On one hand, it is an interpretive effort squarely within the humanities and social sciences to make sense of our world in times and places gone by. With the history of science, we get to have this productive, ongoing discussion with much more contemporary events and efforts in the sciences today. Why do certain ideas take hold and become so prominent? Why do certain questions rise to prominence and get asked in one setting versus another? These are the larger questions about the present-day scientific enterprise that a lot of work in the history of science can help us better understand.

DAVID KAISER is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. He is the author, most recently, of Quantum Legacies.