Heilbron - Physics: a Short History from Quintessence to Quarks

The Scales but small, Expect not truth in all.

Wenceslaus Hollar, A new map of the Cittiess of London and Westminster, 1676

Precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions.

Aristotle, Nichomachean ethics, 1094b12

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the dream of American high-energy physicists, would have had a circumference of 87 kilometers and a price tag of billions of dollars. Its proponents justified the expenditure on several grounds. On the high ground, it would probe the universe to philosophical depths and thus keep faith with the Greeks. Below ground, it would advance tunneling technique and give society perfect sewers. Congress cancelled it in 1993.

The undertaking represented by the SSC might be the way to an ultimate physics. But it is not the Greek way. In antiquity, physics was philosophy, a liberal art, the pursuit of a free man wealthy enough to do what he wished. He did not aim to improve sewers and, since he had no need of public money, did not have to claim that he would. Nor did he want apparatus, since he seldom experimented, or mathematics, since he seldom calculated. The few ancient applications of mathematics to physics constituted a mixed science devoted to the description of phenomena rather than to the search for principles.

In the tripartite division of Greek philosophy, physics stood between logic and ethics. It inquired into the principles regulating the physical world from the high heavens to the Earths center, and from the human soul to the life of the least of living creatures. It thus functioned as a natural theologydefining mans place in natureand as a necessary approach to ethics, or the principles of a good life. For two millennia the main practical value of physics lay in the ethical consequences of its versions of the way the world began and persists.

Greek physics, with its eye to ethics, its indifference to mathematics and experiment, and its independence of states and courts, is sufficiently distinct from an enterprise conducted by salaried teams requiring elaborate technologies and mathematical analyses to deserve a different name. Let it be physica and those who cultivated it physici. This short book describes some of the ways by which ancient physica became modern physics. It does not ransack history to find items in ancient and medieval science that look like physics, but sketches the place and purpose of physica in the societies that supported it. Hence the primary site(s) of cultivation receive special emphasis: the independent private school (antiquity), court and library (Islam), university (later Middle Ages), court again (Renaissance), academy (late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), university again (modernity), and university-government-industry (postmodernity). Of course, successive forms did not annihilate their predecessors. Academies of science survive, primarily as honorific societies and depositories of history, although a few flourish as national channels for funding, consultation, and outreach. The scientific advisory apparatus of government may be considered the descendant of courtly science; and the Greek schools, with their characteristic discursive style, continue in the myriad seminars in which the worlds nascent science is presented and anatomized.

The story of the SSC may do service as a double symbol: through its cost, size, and design, of the transformation of physica into physics; through its cancellation, of the ongoing dilution of the dominance of the United States within an increasingly competitive international system.

Fig. 1. Schools of Athens. Raphaels evocation of the intellectual vigor, diversity, and discursiveness of Greek science.