Identifying as a physicist

Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman spent December 1949 through May 1951 living on Unst, the northernmost inhabited member of the British Isles. There, amid the sheep and seabirds, he observed the islanders going about their daily lives.

The data he gathered formed the basis of his PhD thesis. They also inspired his first and most famous book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Anchor Books, 1959).

In the book, Goffman portrayed social interaction as the seeking, exchange, and use of information among interlocutors. Those steps, he contended, are performed in a way akin to acting on a public stage. Our social selves are like parts played by our true selves, the actors.

A skeptic might contend that Goffman’s perspective is hardly original. The charm of Jane Austen’s novels arise, in part, from the tension between what the characters think and feel in the privacy of their minds and what they say and do in the highly mannered society of Regency England.

But Austen and other novelists tend to emphasize the differences among individuals rather than the commonalities. Readers would be bored if Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennett, and Emma Woodhouse negotiated life’s travails in the same way. By contrast, Goffman and other sociologists strive to interpret and understand the general principles by which humans behave socially.

Goffman sprang to mind earlier this week when I encountered a fascinating paper in the Physics Education section of the arXiv eprint server. Its authors are Paul Irving of Michigan State University and Eleanor Sayre of Kansas State University; its title, “Identity statuses in upper-division physics students .”

In the paper, Irving and Sayre recount an ethnographic study they undertook of three Kansas State physics majors as the students progressed toward graduation. Using two conceptual frameworks—identity statuses and communities of practice—Irving and Sayre sought to understand when, how, and why the students thought of themselves with regard to physics—both as a subject that one associates oneself with and as career that one pursues. Their raw data came from periodically interviewing the students and from observing them participate in an advanced physics lab course.

Even if your taste for social science is weak, I urge you to read the paper—or at least the three case studies on which the analysis is based. The first subject, Sally, told Irving and Sayre that she had a “horrible” physics teacher in high school. She opted to do a double major in chemistry and secondary education. Required to take two physics classes, she became entranced by the subject, especially quantum mechanics, which she described with enthusiasm:

When Irving and Sayre interviewed Sally at the start of her junior year, she considered herself to be a chemist. It was her sole science major, and although she had spent the previous summer working in an atomic physics lab, she felt the physicists there regarded her as “a chemistry student who is dabbling in physics.” But by the end of her junior year, Sally had declared physics as a major. Asked about that decision, she replied,

And when Irving and Sayre observed Sally in the advanced physics lab, she manifested a positive attitude toward physics that was spontaneous and unsolicited. In her remarks about the lab, she had reached the point of identifying herself as a physicist:

The two other subjects, Larry and Bob, were quite different from both Sally and each other. Larry became interested in physics in middle school. His enthusiasm for the subject, stoked by Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s books and TV documentaries, led him declare physics as his major at the start of his college career.

As Larry progressed through college, he maintained his interest in physics and continued to identify himself as a physicist. Solving problems couched in mathematics was especially rewarding, he told Irving and Sayre. The advanced physics lab, however, was a source of frustration to Larry. He concluded that being a physics researcher was not for him. With Irving and Sayre he discussed a wish to become a physics teacher, although at the time of his final interview, he had not committed to that career path.

Bob’s attitude toward physics was not initially as enthusiastic as Larry’s. In high school, Bob wanted to become an engineer. He resolved to major in mechanical engineering, but he added physics as a second major after learning more about the subject in the summer before he matriculated.

By his sophomore year, Bob was in a position to compare this two majors. He found physics more interesting and challenging—even to the point of looking down on his fellowing engineering students—but his enthusiasm for the subject was lower than either Larry’s or Sally’s. When he began the advanced physics lab, he was wavering between engineering and physics. Two things tipped him toward dropping physics: his decision to pursue a career in aeronautical engineering and his struggles with advanced physics lab, which he did not complete.

Physicists and other communities of practice—to use Irving and Sayre’s sociological term—share common activities that define them. Sally’s exposure to one of those practices, doing experiments, strengthened her identify as a physicist to the point that she wanted to become one. Her one obstacle was to have that “horrible” physics teacher in high school.

Irving and Sayre speculate on what interventions, if any, would have helped Larry and Bob. Larry strongly identified as a physicist, but, having discovered that he was not drawn to become a researcher, he could have benefited from “guidance as to what else a physicist can do besides research,” as Irving and Sayre put it.

Bob might have benefited from more extensive preparation before he began the advanced physics lab. But to me, reading his case, what he really needed was engineering classes that were as challenging and inspiring as his physics classes.