Physics, history and fate

SEP 01, 1954

This paper was read before the American Physical Society at its meeting in Austin, Texas, on February 26, 1954. The author is professor of history at the University of Texas.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3061752

Walter Prescott Webb

As I examined the program of the February 1954 meeting of the American Physical Society I was struck by the exclusive concern of the members with what may be called immediacy. The papers seem to deal primarily with problems now in the process of solution. Nowhere did I find that the physicists are concerned with perspective, past or future, with where their subject came from or whither it is going. The practicing physicists seem little concerned with the relation of their subject to the world that lies around it. I shall attempt here to place the subject of physics in its historical context, to show that it arose under peculiar historical conditions, that it grew to its present importance under conditions singularly favorable to it, that those happy conditions are now being modified, and that physics in the future may find the going much harder than it has been during its whole history as a science.

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Walter Prescott Webb, University of Texas.