In the history of American physics, the Second World War is remembered as “the physicists’ war,” shorthand for radar and the bomb. But when James Conant coined the phrase in November 1941, months before Pearl Harbor, he meant something else entirely: physics departments could not train enough instructors to teach basic electricity and magnetism to the enlisted men flooding into uniform. That teaching emergency, not the bomb, was the war physicists were actually fighting. In the two decades that followed, the same institutions that solved it (new federal agencies, new fellowships, a manufactured shortage inflated by a misread Soviet statistic) reached further than anyone intended. Graduate quantum mechanics courses tripled in size, and the questions a physicist was expected to ask in an exam room changed with them.
David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT, has spent his career reconstructing how physicists are made and what that making does to the physics itself. In this episode, we trace this history, and he explains why a discipline’s most abstract questions can depend on how many people are sitting in the room.
