Questions and answers with David C. Cassidy
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0437
Historian of science David C. Cassidy is a professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY, where he primarily teaches physics from a historical perspective for non-science majors. He has written several books and research articles on physics in Germany and the US, with an emphasis on quantum history, physics and society, and biography.
While serving as a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, he began expanding his PhD dissertation on Werner Heisenberg’s route to matrix mechanics into a full-scale biography. That led to Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (W. H. Freeman, 1992), for which he received the Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics and the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society.
Among Cassidy’s other biographical works are J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics and the Bomb (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009). He has also served as an associate editor of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (Princeton University Press). Physics Today recently caught up with him to discuss his most recent book, A Short History of Physics in the American Century (Harvard University Press, 2011).
PT: What motivated you to write this book and why did you opt to do a “short” history?
Cassidy: After completing my biographical study of Oppenheimer—it was not intended as a full-scale biography—I felt that I had much more to say about the history of American physics through the end of Oppenheimer’s life (1967) and to the end of the century. The last third of the century had hardly been touched by historians in a comprehensive fashion. I also wanted for once to write a book that was not a biography.
I decided to make it a short history because we already have Daniel Kevles’s excellent long history, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Knopf, 1971) for the period up to about 1970. So my intention was to carry the story to the end of the century and to focus mainly on the events and themes that I felt were the most significant, as well as the most interesting, and that hopefully would also be of interest to readers.
PT: How did you go about defining your subject, the American physics enterprise, and what’s different about writing a nonbiographical work?
Cassidy: I approach biography and general history in essentially the same way: by seeking to answer not just what happened but also why it happened. In my view, the answers in both genres require the reconstruction of the scientific, cultural, and social milieu of the period. Like a person’s life, American physics followed a discernible trajectory. The profession entered the 20th century in relatively humble circumstances, rose rapidly to world-class stature, achieved preeminence during the early cold war, began to level off as the nation’s needs and policies shifted, and then entered a new era of challenges following the end of the cold war.
PT: What were the key resources you used in your research for this book?
Cassidy: My research and reflection on this subject benefited from a number of valuable works already available on aspects of the overall history—among them, Kevles’s history, which also includes his insightful essay on the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider; H. Hunter Dupree’s classic work, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities (revised edition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Leonard Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research (Cambridge University Press, 1985); Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1986); and Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, 1995, 2012).
I also drew upon histories of industrial facilities, national laboratories, foundations, and departments; detailed accounts of important discoveries, defining events, and people; memoirs, interviews, and conversations, published and unpublished; and the troves of online statistical data now available from federal and other agencies. But in the end there is no substitute for research in the original documents: journal articles and archival records and reports.
PT: Do you argue in the book that decreasing government support has led to the decline of big physics? If so, what are the implications for the discipline?
Cassidy: In overall terms, declines in federal and total support for research so far have not been as drastic as earlier expected. However, decreasing support is already having an effect on those fields that rely upon big research projects. In addition to funding, the increasing interdisciplinary and international character of research may influence decisions in some fields as to whether the big physics model is the most cost-effective and results-effective way to approach newly emerging research topics. A contraction of big physics may lead to an increase in the number of smaller projects which could help to provide the flexibility needed to meet current and future challenges.
PT: What do you think are the implications an increasingly interdisciplinary scientific enterprise and of physics losing, as you say, its transcendent status?
Cassidy: The expanding interdisciplinary and international character of science, together with the decline of a special, transcendent status for physics, has placed American physics in the position of competing for limited resources on a more level playing field with other disciplines and even with physics in other nations. The competition for resources, together with the emergence of new research areas, new perspectives, and new collaborations, should in the end greatly benefit the progress of physics and of science as a whole.
PT: What books are you reading at the moment?
Cassidy: I am currently working on a historical play based on the secretly recorded conversations of captured German nuclear scientists before and after they learned of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. So I’m reading Christian Moe’s Creating Historical Drama: A Guide for Communities, Theatre Groups, and Playwrights (2nd edition, Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).
