In October 1981 I started my undergraduate degree in physics at Imperial College London. Among the courses I took in my second year was one called solid-state physics.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the term solid-state physics was already losing favor among physicists. In 1978 the American Physical Society’s council voted to change the name of its division of solid-state physics (DSSP) to the division of condensed-matter physics.
The reasons for the name change—and, indeed, for the foundation of DSSP—are the topic of a fascinating article by historian Joseph Martin in the most recent issue of Physics in Perspective.
Founded in 1947, DSSP was the third APS division. Among the prime movers behind the new division was Roman Smoluchowski, a research physicist at General Electric. Smoluchowski and his allies wanted to build an industrial physics community within APS. But under the society’s constitution, divisions could be established only around subfields of physics. Unable to found an industrial division, Smoluchowski proposed instead a division of metal physics, which was rejected as being too narrow. Solid-state physics was the broader compromise.
Roman Smoluchowski at work circa 1945 in General Electric’s research laboratory in Schenectady, New York. Smoluchowski was the founding chair of the APS division of solid-state physics. CREDIT: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, courtesy Roman Smoluchowski
Drawing on various sources, Martin concludes that the division’s name change in 1978 did not reflect the growing usage among physicists of the term “condensed matter.” Between 1970 and 1979, only 32 articles in the Physical Review family of journals contained the term in their titles or abstracts. The count for “solid state” was 121. Rather, other factors were at play.
Superconductivity and superfluidity could be analyzed using the same theoretical approach, yet liquid helium was evidently not in a solid state. Indeed, when Lev Landau was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics, he was cited “for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium.”
Then there was what Martin cites as a “widening prestige gap” between solid-state and particle physics. Philip Anderson and others contended that figuring out the myriad ways in which electrons interact with each other inside crystals is as challenging as figuring out the ultimate laws of nature. Yet basic research in condensed matter didn’t attract as much prestige. Landau’s was the only condensed-matter Nobel of the 1960s.
Meanwhile, chemists, engineers, and physicists who worked in the interdisciplinary field of materials were establishing a shared professional identity. The Materials Research Society was founded in 1973 and held its first meeting at the Pennsylvania State University in May that year.
Martin begins his article with an anecdote. At a physics meeting in 1944 Bell Labs president Oliver Buckley fretted that the term “physics” was too obscure to engage the American public. “When Solomon said that ‘a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,’ he knew what he was talking about.” According to Martin, in choosing “condensed matter” over “solid state,” the field’s practitioners
sought a good name by rebelling against solid state’s unorthodox constitution. Physicists who preferred “condensed matter” returned to intellectual common ground—the suite of methods that had evolved to cope with many-body systems—as a basis for claiming autonomy. Condensed matter physicists understood themselves to be just as entitled as their colleagues in high energy physics to pursue fundamental knowledge and, no less importantly, to the esteem that came with it.
Unlike astrophysics or particle physics, condensed-matter physics rarely makes the pages of the New York Times and other popular outlets. Still, the field is thriving. The 21st century has seen the discoveries of new topological phases of electronic matter, iron-based superconductors, graphene. If anything, ties are closer than ever between particle physics and condensed matter. Field theorists are investigating the possibility that space-time, like superconductivity, is an emergent phenomenon. Condensed-matter researchers evoke Skyrmions, Majorana fermions, and other particle physics concepts to explain the exotic phenomena they observe in the lab.
Whether Smoluchowski, whose obituary appeared in the July 1996 issue of Physics Today, would have supported the name change is unclear. He would be glad, I think, to know that the division he helped to found is the largest within APS. One in eight of the society’s members belong to it. And he’d be delighted that largest unit, with 13.2% of all members, is the forum on industrial and applied physics.
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The Week in Physics" is likely a reference to the regular updates or summaries of new physics research, such as those found in publications like Physics Today from AIP Publishing or on news aggregators like Phys.org.
