Candidates for At-Large Member of the Executive Committee:
Jeffrey S. Dunham
Department of Physics
Middlebury College
276 Bicentennial Way
Middlebury, VT 05753
Email: dunham@middlebury.edu
Biographical Information: Jeff Dunham is an experimental physicist with a background in nuclear physics, laser spectroscopy, and nonlinear dynamics. He received his B.S. degree in physics, with distinction, in 1975 from the University of Washington, where he worked as a student assistant at the Nuclear Physics Laboratory. At Stanford University he completed graduate work in experimental nuclear physics, receiving the M.S. degree in 1979 and the Ph.D. degree in 1981. In 1983 he came to Middlebury College, where he served as department chair for 12 years. He has held visiting appointments at Stanford University, Colby College, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Saratov State University in Saratov, Russia. He was Chair of the New England Section of the American Physical Society in 2004 and a member of the Physics Graduate Record Exam Committee at the Educational Testing Service from 1998 to 2004. Since 1999 he has been editor of the Apparatus and Demonstration Notes section of the American Journal of Physics. He is a member of APS, AAPT, Sigma Xi, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the History of Science Society.
Statement: I am an avid consumer of the literature on the history and philosophy of physics, and a strong supporter of the goals of the Forum on History of Physics. Throughout my teaching career I have attempted to bring historical perspective to standard physics courses. For example, in the last term of a junior-level electricity and magnetism course, I require a final paper that involves a “translation” of Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper to the modern notation found in a standard textbook; useful diagrams and missing steps in Einstein’s derivations are to be supplied. This kind of exercise deepens student appreciation for the evolution of our discipline in ways that problems sets cannot. I also teach courses for nonscientists, with titles such as “The American Atomic Bomb and Soviet Espionage,” “Chaos, Complexity, and Self-Organization,” and “Twentieth Century Physics and the Cultural Imagination.” These courses succeed best when taught from a historical perspective, and physics teachers are fortunate that many of our colleagues in physics, history, and philosophy have taken time to provide us with excellent books and videotapes to stimulate the interest of students who want to know something of the historical development of our discipline. I am also an avid reader of more specialized historical work, such as that found in Physics in Perspective and Isis, and would like the Forum to lend support for this kind of serious historical scholarship by showcasing the best of it at its meetings. The Forum on History of Physics is an excellent resource for APS members, yet I believe it would be made stronger by working more closely with specialized groups in the disciplines of history and philosophy that focus on physics and its conceptual development.
Clayton A. Gearhart
Department of Physics
St. John’s University
Collegeville, MN 56321
Email: cgearhart@csbsju.edu
Website: http://faculty.csbsju.edu/cgearhart
Biographical information: I am currently Professor of Physics at St. John’s University in Minnesota. I did my undergraduate work at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and my graduate work at the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1979, with Bill Zimmermann). I began professional life as an experimental liquid-helium physicist, but I became interested in the history of science in my undergraduate years, and after leaving graduate school began pursuing it as a research interest. That transition was aided when, in 1981, I had the good fortune to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Yale University, directed by Martin J. Klein. I have also benefited from the support and encouragement offered by the History of Science Program at the University of Minnesota. Currently, my research focuses on the history of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and early quantum theory. (Consult my web site for the particulars, including a few reprints and slide shows for talks.) I am a long-time member of the APS, AAPT, the Forum on History of Physics (serving on the 2005–2006 Nominating Committee), and the History of Science Society.
Statement: The history of physics has much to offer physicists. Physics majors are often surprised and encouraged to learn that physics was not handed down from on high, but developed a step at a time, often in much more confusing and disorganized (and more creative) ways than textbooks sometimes suggest. Students outside the sciences often find science more interesting when they can also study its historical and philosophical underpinnings. For me, there are other attractions: I often understand the physics better when I learn its history; and I always find the history fascinating. The Forum has over the years done an outstanding job of bringing physicists and historians of physics (who are often themselves physicists) together. It gives historians an audience, particularly for the more technical history, an aspect that historians of science all too often neglect. It shows physicists how their discipline actually developed, and helps to instill in us a more sophisticated sense of our history, in contrast to the oversimplified (not to say inaccurate) picture sometimes found in texts and in the folklore we hand down from one generation of physicists to the next. As someone with a foot in both camps, I would be honored to contribute to the Forum’s work through service on the Executive Committee.
Gordon L. Kane
Department of Physics
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Email: gkane@umich.edu
Biographical Information: Gordon Kane is a theoretical particle physicist and particle cosmologist. He is the Victor Weisskopf Collegiate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan, and Director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics. Kane has published over 175 research papers, written or edited eight books (two for general readers), and given nearly 200 talks at national or international meetings plus many seminars, colloquia, and public talks. One co-edited book is on the history of supersymmetry, and one general book contains historical perspective. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Physics of England, and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.
Statement: Four centuries ago, there was no understanding of how the natural world works, or why it is as it is. Today a great deal is understood. How we got from there to here is fascinating and should be better known to scientists and everyone. History adds meaning to science. I am convinced that understanding how scientific progress occurs improves our ability to make progress and should be more widely available to scientists. I have occasionally taught a general undergraduate course that covers scientific developments in their historical context, “From the Greeks to quarks and dark matter,” Understanding the history, and why science flourishes better in some cultures than others, has long been important to me, and I would be happy to contribute to broadening the appeal and availability of the history of science via the Forum on the History of Physics.
George O. Zimmerman
Department of Physics
Boston University
590 Commonwealth Ave
Boston, MA 02215
Email: goz@buphy.bu.edu
Biographical Information: George O. Zimmerman received his degrees from Yale University. His Ph.D. was completed in 1963, the year he joined the faculty of the Boston University Physics Department, from which he retired in 2000. As an undergraduate he did work in high energy physics at experiments at the Brookhaven Cosmotron and in scanning nuclear emulsions. His work in experimental physics includes the investigation of liquid and solid He-3 in the millidegree region, establishment of the temperature scale at low temperatures with the investigation of a magnetic transition that occurs below 1 millikelvin, the He-3 critical point, magnetism in alloys and intercalated graphite, superconductivity and its applications, and theoretical work on magnetism, superconductivity, and Jahn-Teller effects in colossal magnetoresistance materials.
As a faculty member, Zimmerman taught most of the undergraduate and graduate courses, was department chair for 12 years, chaired the Faculty Council, and was a member and chair of several other influential university committees. In 1978 he and a colleague established the Research Internship in Science and Engineering, a program that brings high-school juniors and seniors into active research laboratories, and the program continues today. Its participants have won many prizes in national science competitions. In addition, he initiated several programs to introduce K-12 students to science.
During his career, Zimmerman collaborated on research with colleagues at the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory and spent sabbaticals at Brookhaven, UC San Diego, Leiden, and Harvard. A speaker at many colloquia and conferences, he recently organized a Forum session at the March 2006 APS Meeting entitled “Low Temperature Physics: A Historical Perspective.”
Statement: Many of those who were in on the foundations of “modern” physics or who knew those who were the founders, are now in their seventies or eighties. The definition of founders does not refer only to those who were awarded Nobel prizes or other prestigious recognitions. The definition also includes those who labored and contributed their ideas to the physics community and thus laid the foundation for the achievements.
As a member of the Forum on History of Physics, I will attempt to organize forums where members of the “older” generation of physicists will be able to share their history and insights with the “younger” generation. Much of what goes on in forums and talks at APS meetings is lost to memory because the proceedings are rarely recorded (other than the abstracts which are published and which reveal only a summary) without conveying the context itself. I will attempt to record and document these sessions so that they can be archived for future generations and so that the ideas and events are not lost.
In addition, I will attempt to interview those physicists who are unable to attend meetings and try to build an archive of personalities and events that were significant to the development of our present day ideas and our profession.
The reason for these actions is the fact that over the years I have known physicists—some famous and some not so famous—whose contributions were lost to history and whose ideas are being rediscovered by the younger generation. Additionally, I have known people in their nineties who have participated in significant events in physics, such as building the atom bomb, who have not had the chance to tell their stories and relay to us the points of view prevailing at the time those events took place. Those are a great loss to history. I want to preserve that which at present can be preserved.
