Should physics professors recite Newton’s Principia?

Last week, the Republican leadership of the US House of Representatives kicked off the 112th Congress by having House members read aloud the entire US Constitution.

The theatrical gesture didn’t bother me. As a naturalized American, I’m awed by the Constitution’s simplicity and soundness. And although the Constitution has been amended 27 times, it remains a relatively brief document. At around 7000 words, the amended Constitution is about as long as two Physics Today feature articles. By contrast, the European Union’s current constitution, the Treaty of Lisbon, tops a novel-length 75 000 words.

But as a physicist, I couldn’t help thinking about the contrast between the US Constitution and science. James Madison and his collaborators finished writing the Constitution in 1787. At that time, no one knew of other galaxies or the quantum world. Most of the elements in the periodic table remained undiscovered. That infectious diseases are caused by microbes, not bad air, was unsuspected.

Now, 224 years later, the body of scientific knowledge has exploded in size and scope, yet the basic legal framework of the US is more or less the same—which leads to another striking contrast. Understanding the Constitution requires reading an 18th-century legal document. Understanding a field of modern science—quantum mechanics, say, or molecular biology—requires reading a modern textbook, the more modern the better.

Physics professors don’t have to ask their students to read Isaac Newton’s Philosophæ naturalis principia mathematica of 1687 or even Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics of 1930. But maybe they should. Maybe, like the House Republicans, they should recite parts of those and other classic texts in class.

Besides being intrinsically interesting, learning about the physics of the past is both inspiring and humbling. If you’re a physicist or some other kind of scientist, the project you’re working on right now may one day be refuted, confirmed, elaborated, superseded, or—as George Mason, the author of the Bill of Rights, might say—amended.