WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.984 align:middle line:90% [SQUEAKING] 00:00:01.984 --> 00:00:03.472 align:middle line:90% [RUSTLING] 00:00:03.472 --> 00:00:04.960 align:middle line:90% [CLICKING] 00:00:04.960 --> 00:00:10.430 align:middle line:90% 00:00:10.430 --> 00:00:12.950 align:middle line:84% DAVID KAISER: So today, we're really 00:00:12.950 --> 00:00:15.170 align:middle line:84% kind of making a transition in the material 00:00:15.170 --> 00:00:21.620 align:middle line:84% from the overtly war time focus we've 00:00:21.620 --> 00:00:23.870 align:middle line:84% had for a couple of classes in a row. 00:00:23.870 --> 00:00:26.570 align:middle line:84% And now we'll start moving toward the last part 00:00:26.570 --> 00:00:30.260 align:middle line:84% of the semester, asking about some implications 00:00:30.260 --> 00:00:35.180 align:middle line:84% or some effects from that very dramatic series of developments 00:00:35.180 --> 00:00:37.820 align:middle line:84% during the Second World War on the course of physics, 00:00:37.820 --> 00:00:41.990 align:middle line:84% and physicists, and research, and teaching in the decades 00:00:41.990 --> 00:00:43.400 align:middle line:90% after the Second World War. 00:00:43.400 --> 00:00:45.980 align:middle line:84% So today's lecture is a kind of pivot to help 00:00:45.980 --> 00:00:48.590 align:middle line:84% us think about moving from the focus 00:00:48.590 --> 00:00:53.030 align:middle line:84% squarely on the wartime projects toward a longer Cold War 00:00:53.030 --> 00:00:54.560 align:middle line:90% situation. 00:00:54.560 --> 00:00:57.170 align:middle line:84% So for the main lecture today, as almost always, 00:00:57.170 --> 00:00:58.560 align:middle line:90% it has three main parts. 00:00:58.560 --> 00:01:01.760 align:middle line:84% The first part is to talk about this phrase that 00:01:01.760 --> 00:01:04.459 align:middle line:84% got used pretty early on after the Second World War, 00:01:04.459 --> 00:01:07.220 align:middle line:84% and historians and scientists still tend to use it, 00:01:07.220 --> 00:01:08.840 align:middle line:90% this phrase called big science. 00:01:08.840 --> 00:01:10.423 align:middle line:84% So the first part, we're going to talk 00:01:10.423 --> 00:01:13.200 align:middle line:84% about what have people meant by this phrase big science. 00:01:13.200 --> 00:01:14.880 align:middle line:84% What are the characteristics that we 00:01:14.880 --> 00:01:16.530 align:middle line:90% can identify from our readings? 00:01:16.530 --> 00:01:19.050 align:middle line:84% And we already saw hints from our focus 00:01:19.050 --> 00:01:21.337 align:middle line:90% on the wartime projects. 00:01:21.337 --> 00:01:22.920 align:middle line:84% And that will be the first main chunk. 00:01:22.920 --> 00:01:25.990 align:middle line:84% I think that will be the longest part of our discussion today. 00:01:25.990 --> 00:01:30.240 align:middle line:84% And then two shorter follow-ups that 00:01:30.240 --> 00:01:32.250 align:middle line:84% begin to help us think through, what 00:01:32.250 --> 00:01:36.990 align:middle line:84% were some of the implications of this period of post Second 00:01:36.990 --> 00:01:39.788 align:middle line:84% World War big-science for the study of physics 00:01:39.788 --> 00:01:41.580 align:middle line:84% largely in the United States so we can talk 00:01:41.580 --> 00:01:44.790 align:middle line:84% about some comparative or examples from other parts 00:01:44.790 --> 00:01:45.610 align:middle line:90% of the world? 00:01:45.610 --> 00:01:48.518 align:middle line:84% But most of my own research has been focused on developments 00:01:48.518 --> 00:01:49.560 align:middle line:90% within the United States. 00:01:49.560 --> 00:01:51.330 align:middle line:84% That's what I know best, and that's 00:01:51.330 --> 00:01:54.600 align:middle line:84% what I'll mostly focus on for the rest of today. 00:01:54.600 --> 00:01:57.480 align:middle line:84% So who was thinking about this question 00:01:57.480 --> 00:01:59.940 align:middle line:84% of a term that was also very widely used 00:01:59.940 --> 00:02:02.295 align:middle line:84% at the time, "scientific manpower," with its 00:02:02.295 --> 00:02:03.990 align:middle line:84% to our I think many of our eyes today 00:02:03.990 --> 00:02:06.780 align:middle line:84% this kind of inescapable gendered notion of a manpower, 00:02:06.780 --> 00:02:09.870 align:middle line:84% a certain kind of person that was being sought for to be 00:02:09.870 --> 00:02:11.880 align:middle line:90% trained up during the Cold War? 00:02:11.880 --> 00:02:14.100 align:middle line:84% And then lastly, the part that I wrote 00:02:14.100 --> 00:02:16.860 align:middle line:84% about for one of the assigned readings for today, 00:02:16.860 --> 00:02:21.660 align:middle line:84% can we trace through intellectual or pedagogical 00:02:21.660 --> 00:02:25.830 align:middle line:84% aftershocks or implications of these very significant changes 00:02:25.830 --> 00:02:28.830 align:middle line:84% in priorities and infrastructure? 00:02:28.830 --> 00:02:31.590 align:middle line:84% What does it mean for people entering the field of physics 00:02:31.590 --> 00:02:35.040 align:middle line:84% during this new and kind of fast changing scene? 00:02:35.040 --> 00:02:37.270 align:middle line:90% So that's our plan for today. 00:02:37.270 --> 00:02:43.650 align:middle line:84% So one of the classic and still kind of worth reading articles 00:02:43.650 --> 00:02:46.530 align:middle line:84% on this topic of big science is published now 00:02:46.530 --> 00:02:49.200 align:middle line:84% more than 30 years ago by my colleague Paul 00:02:49.200 --> 00:02:51.990 align:middle line:84% Forman in this journal that used to be 00:02:51.990 --> 00:02:54.420 align:middle line:84% called Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological 00:02:54.420 --> 00:02:54.930 align:middle line:90% Sciences. 00:02:54.930 --> 00:02:56.763 align:middle line:84% Now the journal is called Historical Studies 00:02:56.763 --> 00:02:57.810 align:middle line:90% in the Natural Sciences. 00:02:57.810 --> 00:03:00.090 align:middle line:84% So Forman's article is very, very long. 00:03:00.090 --> 00:03:02.370 align:middle line:84% The article is nearly 90 journal pages. 00:03:02.370 --> 00:03:05.880 align:middle line:84% It's practically a little monograph unto itself. 00:03:05.880 --> 00:03:07.950 align:middle line:84% What Forman was tracking was basically 00:03:07.950 --> 00:03:09.180 align:middle line:90% anything he could count. 00:03:09.180 --> 00:03:11.580 align:middle line:84% Much like me, Paul likes to count stuff. 00:03:11.580 --> 00:03:13.020 align:middle line:84% He's very good at counting things. 00:03:13.020 --> 00:03:16.530 align:middle line:84% As a way to characterize change over time for the US 00:03:16.530 --> 00:03:17.890 align:middle line:90% based physics community. 00:03:17.890 --> 00:03:20.820 align:middle line:84% And this is just a remarkably rich article. 00:03:20.820 --> 00:03:23.375 align:middle line:84% I think very creative use of lots of different sources 00:03:23.375 --> 00:03:24.750 align:middle line:84% to put together what is otherwise 00:03:24.750 --> 00:03:27.210 align:middle line:84% a pretty consistent picture that Paul was really 00:03:27.210 --> 00:03:31.170 align:middle line:84% among the earliest to paint in some kind of comprehensiveness. 00:03:31.170 --> 00:03:33.570 align:middle line:84% So I've taken this plot from his article. 00:03:33.570 --> 00:03:36.030 align:middle line:84% Anything we might want to count, the membership 00:03:36.030 --> 00:03:37.980 align:middle line:84% in the American Physical Society, 00:03:37.980 --> 00:03:41.650 align:middle line:84% the number of papers presented at the meetings or something 00:03:41.650 --> 00:03:42.150 align:middle line:90% I've done. 00:03:42.150 --> 00:03:43.680 align:middle line:84% Look at, say, the number of articles 00:03:43.680 --> 00:03:45.270 align:middle line:90% published in the main journals. 00:03:45.270 --> 00:03:48.930 align:middle line:84% Any of these things we can count starts growing exponentially 00:03:48.930 --> 00:03:51.360 align:middle line:84% during and especially after the Second World War. 00:03:51.360 --> 00:03:53.130 align:middle line:84% And the one that Paul really focuses on 00:03:53.130 --> 00:03:56.970 align:middle line:84% and what often gets associated with the term big science 00:03:56.970 --> 00:03:59.160 align:middle line:90% was budgets, was funding rates. 00:03:59.160 --> 00:04:01.590 align:middle line:84% And that's this third, that's his curve labeled number 00:04:01.590 --> 00:04:04.140 align:middle line:90% three in this plot of his. 00:04:04.140 --> 00:04:06.480 align:middle line:84% The funding for what at the time was often 00:04:06.480 --> 00:04:09.240 align:middle line:84% called basic research, meaning it wasn't 00:04:09.240 --> 00:04:10.830 align:middle line:90% to build specific devices. 00:04:10.830 --> 00:04:14.010 align:middle line:84% It wasn't tied to very specific so called mission oriented 00:04:14.010 --> 00:04:15.180 align:middle line:90% programs. 00:04:15.180 --> 00:04:19.410 align:middle line:84% It was for open ended, often academic or university 00:04:19.410 --> 00:04:22.320 align:middle line:84% based research in the physical sciences 00:04:22.320 --> 00:04:24.420 align:middle line:90% or in physics even narrowly. 00:04:24.420 --> 00:04:26.970 align:middle line:84% And one of the amazing things that Paul identifies 00:04:26.970 --> 00:04:29.910 align:middle line:84% is that over just a 15 year period from just 00:04:29.910 --> 00:04:32.490 align:middle line:84% on the cusp of the Second World War to just 00:04:32.490 --> 00:04:34.380 align:middle line:84% really not even a whole decade after, 00:04:34.380 --> 00:04:38.100 align:middle line:84% that 15 year period, the budget just in the United States 00:04:38.100 --> 00:04:41.940 align:middle line:84% for funding the so called curiosity driven 00:04:41.940 --> 00:04:44.520 align:middle line:84% or basic research in physics, the budget 00:04:44.520 --> 00:04:46.440 align:middle line:90% grew by a factor of 25. 00:04:46.440 --> 00:04:48.027 align:middle line:90% Not a 25% increase. 00:04:48.027 --> 00:04:49.860 align:middle line:84% That already would seem generous these days. 00:04:49.860 --> 00:04:52.680 align:middle line:84% It grew by a multiplicative factor of 25. 00:04:52.680 --> 00:04:55.110 align:middle line:90% That still boggles my mind. 00:04:55.110 --> 00:04:57.053 align:middle line:84% And that includes the extraordinary escalation 00:04:57.053 --> 00:04:58.470 align:middle line:84% during the war and then as we see, 00:04:58.470 --> 00:05:01.128 align:middle line:84% it never slows down or doesn't slow down for quite some time, 00:05:01.128 --> 00:05:01.920 align:middle line:90% even after the war. 00:05:01.920 --> 00:05:05.190 align:middle line:84% So the first thing that Paul helps us identify 00:05:05.190 --> 00:05:09.360 align:middle line:84% is this enormous change in scale for things like funding 00:05:09.360 --> 00:05:10.667 align:middle line:90% for research in physics. 00:05:10.667 --> 00:05:12.250 align:middle line:84% The next thing he does, this is really 00:05:12.250 --> 00:05:14.740 align:middle line:84% where the article gets especially detailed, 00:05:14.740 --> 00:05:17.890 align:middle line:84% is not just the scale of funding, but also the source. 00:05:17.890 --> 00:05:20.158 align:middle line:84% That was also changing quite dramatically 00:05:20.158 --> 00:05:22.450 align:middle line:84% during these immediate years after the Second World War 00:05:22.450 --> 00:05:23.650 align:middle line:90% in the United States. 00:05:23.650 --> 00:05:26.530 align:middle line:84% So four years after the war in 1949, 00:05:26.530 --> 00:05:30.910 align:middle line:84% 96% of the funds that represent this kind of curve here 00:05:30.910 --> 00:05:33.340 align:middle line:84% for academic basic physics research 00:05:33.340 --> 00:05:35.620 align:middle line:84% were coming not just from the US federal government. 00:05:35.620 --> 00:05:36.580 align:middle line:90% That was already new. 00:05:36.580 --> 00:05:39.378 align:middle line:84% But coming from the defense or military related branches. 00:05:39.378 --> 00:05:41.170 align:middle line:84% That included the Atomic Energy Commission, 00:05:41.170 --> 00:05:44.710 align:middle line:84% a nominally civilian agency that nonetheless 00:05:44.710 --> 00:05:47.630 align:middle line:84% was responsible for the nuclear weapons complex. 00:05:47.630 --> 00:05:50.170 align:middle line:84% So if you include AEC as defense related 00:05:50.170 --> 00:05:53.320 align:middle line:84% as well as what became called the Department of Defense, 00:05:53.320 --> 00:05:57.700 align:middle line:84% 96% of this exponentially growing amount of money 00:05:57.700 --> 00:05:59.800 align:middle line:84% was coming from now a unique source. 00:05:59.800 --> 00:06:02.170 align:middle line:84% And what Paul finds, I find this even more interesting, 00:06:02.170 --> 00:06:06.760 align:middle line:84% five years later in 1954 as the total budget 00:06:06.760 --> 00:06:09.340 align:middle line:84% has grown exponentially, the proportion coming 00:06:09.340 --> 00:06:11.667 align:middle line:84% from the defense related agencies of the US 00:06:11.667 --> 00:06:13.250 align:middle line:84% federal government, those had actually 00:06:13.250 --> 00:06:17.150 align:middle line:84% grown to an even higher proportion from 96% to 98%. 00:06:17.150 --> 00:06:20.030 align:middle line:84% So why is that especially noteworthy? 00:06:20.030 --> 00:06:24.510 align:middle line:84% Because in between these two dates starting in 1950, 00:06:24.510 --> 00:06:26.660 align:middle line:84% the United States established for the first time 00:06:26.660 --> 00:06:29.720 align:middle line:84% the fully civilian National Science Foundation. 00:06:29.720 --> 00:06:34.130 align:middle line:84% So even after there was a different non-defense oriented 00:06:34.130 --> 00:06:37.640 align:middle line:84% funding mechanism to support basic research in areas 00:06:37.640 --> 00:06:39.990 align:middle line:84% like physics and the life sciences and eventually 00:06:39.990 --> 00:06:43.100 align:middle line:84% some social sciences, even after there was a thoroughly civilian 00:06:43.100 --> 00:06:46.400 align:middle line:84% mechanism, nonetheless both the amount and the proportion 00:06:46.400 --> 00:06:49.430 align:middle line:84% of funds coming from defense related agencies 00:06:49.430 --> 00:06:51.840 align:middle line:84% was growing exponentially during this period. 00:06:51.840 --> 00:06:54.320 align:middle line:84% So often when people use the term big science, 00:06:54.320 --> 00:06:57.960 align:middle line:84% even back in this time period itself, 00:06:57.960 --> 00:07:01.430 align:middle line:84% let alone by historians since, they often mean big budgets. 00:07:01.430 --> 00:07:03.770 align:middle line:84% Kind of unprecedented expenditures 00:07:03.770 --> 00:07:07.520 align:middle line:84% often from federal, from nation state budgets, 00:07:07.520 --> 00:07:10.700 align:middle line:84% not just from local universities or associated industries. 00:07:10.700 --> 00:07:13.490 align:middle line:84% But enormous rise, fast rising budgets 00:07:13.490 --> 00:07:16.250 align:middle line:84% to support basic research across the sciences. 00:07:16.250 --> 00:07:18.020 align:middle line:84% That was big science kind of type one. 00:07:18.020 --> 00:07:21.320 align:middle line:84% And indeed here at MIT, that was absolutely 00:07:21.320 --> 00:07:24.110 align:middle line:84% the story of MIT in particular as a kind of microcosm 00:07:24.110 --> 00:07:25.340 align:middle line:90% for the broader trends. 00:07:25.340 --> 00:07:28.250 align:middle line:84% Here I'm showing the annual operating budget for MIT 00:07:28.250 --> 00:07:31.850 align:middle line:84% in inflation adjusted constant dollars. 00:07:31.850 --> 00:07:33.650 align:middle line:90% You can compare like with like. 00:07:33.650 --> 00:07:36.680 align:middle line:84% Here's the very end of spending on the radiation laboratory, 00:07:36.680 --> 00:07:38.640 align:middle line:84% the radar project here on campus. 00:07:38.640 --> 00:07:42.530 align:middle line:84% There was a brief demobilization after the war and then a kind 00:07:42.530 --> 00:07:46.160 align:middle line:84% of exponential rise, again, for the better part of two decades. 00:07:46.160 --> 00:07:48.200 align:middle line:84% That was by no means unique to MIT. 00:07:48.200 --> 00:07:50.120 align:middle line:84% That's reflective of these broader trends 00:07:50.120 --> 00:07:53.827 align:middle line:84% that Forman had identified in that long ago article. 00:07:53.827 --> 00:07:55.660 align:middle line:84% Now, what were people doing with that money? 00:07:55.660 --> 00:07:56.880 align:middle line:90% I love this photograph. 00:07:56.880 --> 00:08:00.510 align:middle line:84% This is from MIT's own once quite beloved synchrotron 00:08:00.510 --> 00:08:01.920 align:middle line:90% only recently decommissioned. 00:08:01.920 --> 00:08:05.730 align:middle line:84% And this is on the facility on Vassar Street that will soon 00:08:05.730 --> 00:08:07.920 align:middle line:84% be torn down to make room for the new building 00:08:07.920 --> 00:08:09.900 align:middle line:84% for the new College of Computing. 00:08:09.900 --> 00:08:12.300 align:middle line:84% But starting in the early and mid '50s, 00:08:12.300 --> 00:08:14.340 align:middle line:84% MIT had its own particle accelerator, 00:08:14.340 --> 00:08:16.980 align:middle line:84% this particular kind of device called a synchrotron. 00:08:16.980 --> 00:08:19.512 align:middle line:84% Here's a grad student working on it with his bow tie. 00:08:19.512 --> 00:08:20.220 align:middle line:90% I just love this. 00:08:20.220 --> 00:08:23.010 align:middle line:84% You're going to do your work with your sports jacket 00:08:23.010 --> 00:08:23.590 align:middle line:90% and bow tie. 00:08:23.590 --> 00:08:25.770 align:middle line:84% I don't know if that was because this person knew 00:08:25.770 --> 00:08:27.910 align:middle line:84% a photographer was coming or just how you dressed 00:08:27.910 --> 00:08:29.160 align:middle line:90% as a grad student in the '50s. 00:08:29.160 --> 00:08:30.540 align:middle line:84% I think it might have been the latter. 00:08:30.540 --> 00:08:32.873 align:middle line:84% Anyway, so we start getting larger and larger equipment. 00:08:32.873 --> 00:08:35.010 align:middle line:84% There's no longer benchtop experimentation. 00:08:35.010 --> 00:08:36.539 align:middle line:84% This is beginning to grow rapidly. 00:08:36.539 --> 00:08:39.179 align:middle line:84% It's about to engulf at least this one graduate student. 00:08:39.179 --> 00:08:42.570 align:middle line:84% And of course, that became just a pale, pale imitation 00:08:42.570 --> 00:08:44.370 align:middle line:84% of the kinds of machines that were also 00:08:44.370 --> 00:08:46.950 align:middle line:84% becoming more common in other parts of the country 00:08:46.950 --> 00:08:48.960 align:middle line:84% also supported by the federal government, 00:08:48.960 --> 00:08:51.960 align:middle line:84% almost overwhelmingly by the Atomic Energy Commission. 00:08:51.960 --> 00:08:55.030 align:middle line:84% This was, for a time at least, the largest in the world 00:08:55.030 --> 00:08:57.610 align:middle line:84% and certainly in the United States called the bevatron, 00:08:57.610 --> 00:09:00.615 align:middle line:84% or the billion electron volt accelerator at Berkeley. 00:09:00.615 --> 00:09:02.740 align:middle line:84% And here again, you see an individual working on it 00:09:02.740 --> 00:09:05.540 align:middle line:90% with necktie in the lab. 00:09:05.540 --> 00:09:06.820 align:middle line:90% This is a complete circle. 00:09:06.820 --> 00:09:08.507 align:middle line:84% This is a ring of magnets to accelerate 00:09:08.507 --> 00:09:09.590 align:middle line:90% the particles in a circle. 00:09:09.590 --> 00:09:11.090 align:middle line:84% So you can get a sense of the scale. 00:09:11.090 --> 00:09:14.510 align:middle line:84% They're really filling a kind of factory sized building. 00:09:14.510 --> 00:09:17.260 align:middle line:84% So what happens when the United States built 00:09:17.260 --> 00:09:20.290 align:middle line:84% many, many of these from the kind of modest sized 00:09:20.290 --> 00:09:24.160 align:middle line:84% MIT synchrotron up to these behemoths? 00:09:24.160 --> 00:09:27.010 align:middle line:84% Physicists were able to accelerate nuclear particles 00:09:27.010 --> 00:09:29.020 align:middle line:84% to unprecedented energies, rev them up 00:09:29.020 --> 00:09:32.260 align:middle line:84% by those electromagnets, basically, smash them together, 00:09:32.260 --> 00:09:35.500 align:middle line:84% and very soon they began finding an exponentially rising 00:09:35.500 --> 00:09:37.400 align:middle line:90% number of new particles. 00:09:37.400 --> 00:09:39.250 align:middle line:84% So with these larger and larger machines, 00:09:39.250 --> 00:09:42.250 align:middle line:84% physicists could probe energies, excuse me, 00:09:42.250 --> 00:09:45.700 align:middle line:84% interactions among particles at higher and higher energies. 00:09:45.700 --> 00:09:48.220 align:middle line:84% And not quite every single time they tried, 00:09:48.220 --> 00:09:51.040 align:middle line:84% but with remarkable rapidity, they 00:09:51.040 --> 00:09:53.830 align:middle line:84% began finding more and more new or previously 00:09:53.830 --> 00:09:57.550 align:middle line:84% unidentified particles zooming out of these collisions 00:09:57.550 --> 00:09:58.930 align:middle line:90% among nuclear particles. 00:09:58.930 --> 00:10:01.540 align:middle line:84% And so even by the early '50s, the joke 00:10:01.540 --> 00:10:04.060 align:middle line:84% was that basically every single month the community had 00:10:04.060 --> 00:10:05.290 align:middle line:90% discovered some new particle. 00:10:05.290 --> 00:10:08.560 align:middle line:84% And that's borne out by the data that a different colleague 00:10:08.560 --> 00:10:12.370 align:middle line:84% of mine compiled some years ago showing the number of published 00:10:12.370 --> 00:10:14.290 align:middle line:84% discoveries of seemingly new or elementary 00:10:14.290 --> 00:10:17.000 align:middle line:84% particles growing, again, exponentially over time. 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:18.700 align:middle line:84% So the second meaning that's often 00:10:18.700 --> 00:10:21.730 align:middle line:84% attributed to this very common phrase of big science 00:10:21.730 --> 00:10:22.990 align:middle line:90% is big machines. 00:10:22.990 --> 00:10:25.930 align:middle line:84% Kind of conducting research on a scale 00:10:25.930 --> 00:10:29.920 align:middle line:84% of instrumentation that, again, had very few, if any precedents 00:10:29.920 --> 00:10:31.090 align:middle line:90% before the Second World War. 00:10:31.090 --> 00:10:35.260 align:middle line:84% So big funding, big budgets, and also big machines. 00:10:35.260 --> 00:10:37.870 align:middle line:84% There's a third kind of element of big science 00:10:37.870 --> 00:10:40.360 align:middle line:84% that really I've been most interested in, most curious 00:10:40.360 --> 00:10:42.700 align:middle line:90% about for a long time. 00:10:42.700 --> 00:10:45.590 align:middle line:84% I've written a lot about this in my historical work. 00:10:45.590 --> 00:10:48.040 align:middle line:84% And the third aspect of big science that I think often 00:10:48.040 --> 00:10:50.350 align:middle line:84% got overlooked in the early days was actually 00:10:50.350 --> 00:10:54.160 align:middle line:84% big enrollments, an enormous training mission to train lots 00:10:54.160 --> 00:10:56.800 align:middle line:84% and lots and lots of specialists in the sciences 00:10:56.800 --> 00:10:59.830 align:middle line:84% often in physics or the closely allied physical sciences 00:10:59.830 --> 00:11:00.890 align:middle line:90% in particular. 00:11:00.890 --> 00:11:03.220 align:middle line:84% So here's, again, a photo kind of close to home. 00:11:03.220 --> 00:11:07.220 align:middle line:84% Here's Tony French, who I think only very recently passed away. 00:11:07.220 --> 00:11:09.410 align:middle line:90% He lived to just about age 100. 00:11:09.410 --> 00:11:10.810 align:middle line:90% He lived a very, very long life. 00:11:10.810 --> 00:11:12.768 align:middle line:84% He actually had worked on the Manhattan Project 00:11:12.768 --> 00:11:15.790 align:middle line:84% originally himself and then made a very long, 00:11:15.790 --> 00:11:18.310 align:middle line:84% distinguished career teaching physics here at MIT teaching 00:11:18.310 --> 00:11:21.160 align:middle line:84% in a room that I'm sure many of very well, 26100. 00:11:21.160 --> 00:11:23.050 align:middle line:84% This is when this kind of picture 00:11:23.050 --> 00:11:24.760 align:middle line:84% for undergraduate physics classes 00:11:24.760 --> 00:11:28.480 align:middle line:84% no longer becomes unthinkable but in fact becomes the norm. 00:11:28.480 --> 00:11:31.910 align:middle line:84% Again, really across the country, not only at MIT. 00:11:31.910 --> 00:11:34.210 align:middle line:84% So the third kind of aspect of big science 00:11:34.210 --> 00:11:37.840 align:middle line:84% that I found most interesting, most wanted to dig into, 00:11:37.840 --> 00:11:39.190 align:middle line:90% was big enrollments. 00:11:39.190 --> 00:11:40.990 align:middle line:90% This kind of training mission. 00:11:40.990 --> 00:11:42.910 align:middle line:84% I want to take a few minutes now-- 00:11:42.910 --> 00:11:43.560 align:middle line:90% oh, excuse me. 00:11:43.560 --> 00:11:46.180 align:middle line:84% The last point here again to bring it back home to MIT. 00:11:46.180 --> 00:11:48.430 align:middle line:84% Again, MIT's enrollments grow exponentially 00:11:48.430 --> 00:11:51.250 align:middle line:84% during this period exactly consistent 00:11:51.250 --> 00:11:53.420 align:middle line:84% with the broader nationwide pattern. 00:11:53.420 --> 00:11:56.110 align:middle line:84% This is also the first period in the decades 00:11:56.110 --> 00:11:58.330 align:middle line:84% soon after the Second World War where 00:11:58.330 --> 00:12:01.900 align:middle line:84% the number of full time graduate students 00:12:01.900 --> 00:12:04.330 align:middle line:84% catches up and actually comes to exceed the number 00:12:04.330 --> 00:12:05.560 align:middle line:90% of undergraduates at MIT. 00:12:05.560 --> 00:12:07.480 align:middle line:84% Right now they're just about 50/50, 00:12:07.480 --> 00:12:10.070 align:middle line:84% but it had been a very small proportion in MIT's earlier 00:12:10.070 --> 00:12:10.570 align:middle line:90% history. 00:12:10.570 --> 00:12:13.390 align:middle line:84% Again, consistent with many places across the country. 00:12:13.390 --> 00:12:17.080 align:middle line:84% So you have a very rapid expansion in this mission 00:12:17.080 --> 00:12:18.910 align:middle line:84% to train lots and lots of new specialists, 00:12:18.910 --> 00:12:22.720 align:middle line:84% often in the physical sciences and related engineering fields. 00:12:22.720 --> 00:12:23.710 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:12:23.710 --> 00:12:26.260 align:middle line:84% So this plot I look at all the time. 00:12:26.260 --> 00:12:28.150 align:middle line:84% I stare at this picture really often. 00:12:28.150 --> 00:12:30.490 align:middle line:84% And I think most if not all of our teaching assistants 00:12:30.490 --> 00:12:34.660 align:middle line:84% have stared at this graph also, because I can't get away 00:12:34.660 --> 00:12:35.240 align:middle line:90% from it. 00:12:35.240 --> 00:12:38.860 align:middle line:84% So this is a plot of the number of physics PhDs granted 00:12:38.860 --> 00:12:41.860 align:middle line:84% in the United States per year starting in 1900. 00:12:41.860 --> 00:12:44.290 align:middle line:84% And this version of the plot goes through 1980. 00:12:44.290 --> 00:12:46.870 align:middle line:84% We can read a lot of information off the kind 00:12:46.870 --> 00:12:48.500 align:middle line:90% of structure of this plot. 00:12:48.500 --> 00:12:50.792 align:middle line:84% We can see that the enrollments fell very quickly 00:12:50.792 --> 00:12:52.750 align:middle line:84% during the Second World War, which makes sense. 00:12:52.750 --> 00:12:53.900 align:middle line:90% People were drafted. 00:12:53.900 --> 00:12:56.750 align:middle line:84% Many people who were drafted but were in physics 00:12:56.750 --> 00:12:59.000 align:middle line:84% left school to go work on either the radar 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:01.370 align:middle line:84% project, the Manhattan Project, or dozens 00:13:01.370 --> 00:13:03.860 align:middle line:84% of other related military projects. 00:13:03.860 --> 00:13:05.780 align:middle line:84% During the war, enrollments plummet. 00:13:05.780 --> 00:13:07.970 align:middle line:84% Then they start growing very rapidly as 00:13:07.970 --> 00:13:09.590 align:middle line:90% soon as the war is over. 00:13:09.590 --> 00:13:12.410 align:middle line:84% They kind of reach a kind of what felt to many people 00:13:12.410 --> 00:13:14.600 align:middle line:84% at the time a saturation or a plateau. 00:13:14.600 --> 00:13:17.810 align:middle line:84% But then they come take off yet again exponentially very soon 00:13:17.810 --> 00:13:20.780 align:middle line:84% after the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite 00:13:20.780 --> 00:13:23.820 align:middle line:84% launched by the Soviet Union late in 1957. 00:13:23.820 --> 00:13:26.630 align:middle line:84% So we have these periods of exponential growth 00:13:26.630 --> 00:13:27.450 align:middle line:90% and expansion. 00:13:27.450 --> 00:13:29.610 align:middle line:84% In fact, during the second wave here 00:13:29.610 --> 00:13:34.100 align:middle line:84% starting in the late 1950s between this take off 00:13:34.100 --> 00:13:37.250 align:middle line:84% and the peak, the number of university 00:13:37.250 --> 00:13:38.930 align:middle line:84% departments within the United States, 00:13:38.930 --> 00:13:42.518 align:middle line:84% physics departments, that began offering a PhD degree doubled. 00:13:42.518 --> 00:13:44.810 align:middle line:84% So it wasn't just that the same departments got bigger. 00:13:44.810 --> 00:13:45.770 align:middle line:90% They really did. 00:13:45.770 --> 00:13:47.960 align:middle line:84% But even the capacity across the United States 00:13:47.960 --> 00:13:51.060 align:middle line:84% to make more and more trained specialists doubled as well. 00:13:51.060 --> 00:13:53.220 align:middle line:84% The number of PhD granting physics departments 00:13:53.220 --> 00:13:57.360 align:middle line:84% doubled between 1958 and 1960 in the US. 00:13:57.360 --> 00:14:00.540 align:middle line:84% So many, many fields of study were growing rapidly 00:14:00.540 --> 00:14:01.230 align:middle line:90% after the war. 00:14:01.230 --> 00:14:02.760 align:middle line:84% This was a period of the so called 00:14:02.760 --> 00:14:06.150 align:middle line:84% GI Bill, which gave support at least to some returning 00:14:06.150 --> 00:14:06.660 align:middle line:90% veterans. 00:14:06.660 --> 00:14:10.530 align:middle line:84% Or now historians have identified some really quite 00:14:10.530 --> 00:14:13.350 align:middle line:84% extraordinary racial disparities and frankly 00:14:13.350 --> 00:14:16.740 align:middle line:84% just biases in the way the GI Bill was implemented. 00:14:16.740 --> 00:14:21.690 align:middle line:84% It was originally designed to help 00:14:21.690 --> 00:14:24.780 align:middle line:84% all US veterans of the wartime Armed Services 00:14:24.780 --> 00:14:28.480 align:middle line:84% get extensive support for things like going back to college, 00:14:28.480 --> 00:14:30.540 align:middle line:84% including also going back for advanced degrees 00:14:30.540 --> 00:14:32.110 align:middle line:90% beyond undergraduate degrees. 00:14:32.110 --> 00:14:35.670 align:middle line:84% So every field of study in the academy across the United 00:14:35.670 --> 00:14:38.340 align:middle line:84% States grew exponentially after the war. 00:14:38.340 --> 00:14:39.870 align:middle line:90% But look at these exponents. 00:14:39.870 --> 00:14:42.120 align:middle line:84% The rate of growth for physics was actually 00:14:42.120 --> 00:14:44.640 align:middle line:84% twice as high as for all other fields combined. 00:14:44.640 --> 00:14:48.000 align:middle line:84% So to make it easy to spot, I've taken all PhDs, that's 00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:51.300 align:middle line:84% this green line, and I've just normalized it to the same value 00:14:51.300 --> 00:14:55.110 align:middle line:84% as physics PhDs in 1945, just so we can see rates of change. 00:14:55.110 --> 00:14:56.358 align:middle line:90% I could have made a log plot. 00:14:56.358 --> 00:14:57.900 align:middle line:84% But anyway, this is just a way to say 00:14:57.900 --> 00:15:02.140 align:middle line:84% what's the steepness of this curve compared to that curve. 00:15:02.140 --> 00:15:05.340 align:middle line:84% So physics was growing twice as fast 00:15:05.340 --> 00:15:08.070 align:middle line:84% during a period of general exponential growth. 00:15:08.070 --> 00:15:11.010 align:middle line:84% Likewise, all the fields went through some contraction. 00:15:11.010 --> 00:15:13.320 align:middle line:84% None fell nearly as sharply or as dramatically 00:15:13.320 --> 00:15:16.620 align:middle line:90% as physics following this peak. 00:15:16.620 --> 00:15:18.570 align:middle line:84% This was not simply demographics. 00:15:18.570 --> 00:15:21.240 align:middle line:84% This wasn't just more kind of college 00:15:21.240 --> 00:15:22.630 align:middle line:90% aged people in the community. 00:15:22.630 --> 00:15:24.910 align:middle line:84% In fact, those trends were exactly out of phase. 00:15:24.910 --> 00:15:29.850 align:middle line:84% So this purple line shows the proportion of the US population 00:15:29.850 --> 00:15:32.760 align:middle line:84% in what we think of as a kind of common age 00:15:32.760 --> 00:15:34.440 align:middle line:90% range for graduate school. 00:15:34.440 --> 00:15:36.840 align:middle line:84% The bulk of PhD students would have been in the range 00:15:36.840 --> 00:15:39.060 align:middle line:90% ages 25 to 29 at the time. 00:15:39.060 --> 00:15:41.610 align:middle line:84% That proportion was actually falling 00:15:41.610 --> 00:15:45.700 align:middle line:84% during this exponential rise and then rising during the crash. 00:15:45.700 --> 00:15:48.267 align:middle line:84% So this wasn't just more baby boomers 00:15:48.267 --> 00:15:49.350 align:middle line:90% entering higher education. 00:15:49.350 --> 00:15:50.558 align:middle line:90% That's actually out of phase. 00:15:50.558 --> 00:15:53.580 align:middle line:84% The baby boomers enter higher education later. 00:15:53.580 --> 00:15:54.960 align:middle line:84% This is growing like gangbusters. 00:15:54.960 --> 00:15:57.630 align:middle line:84% It points instead to some very intentional shifts 00:15:57.630 --> 00:15:59.370 align:middle line:84% in policies and incentives, as we'll 00:15:59.370 --> 00:16:01.690 align:middle line:90% talk a bit more about today. 00:16:01.690 --> 00:16:05.550 align:middle line:84% But before we go on to say what was happening at universities 00:16:05.550 --> 00:16:07.020 align:middle line:84% and congressional funding and all 00:16:07.020 --> 00:16:10.170 align:middle line:84% that, I want to pause a bit more on this photograph and say, 00:16:10.170 --> 00:16:12.240 align:middle line:90% who is filling those seats? 00:16:12.240 --> 00:16:14.490 align:middle line:84% If we see, it's not only Professor French 00:16:14.490 --> 00:16:17.310 align:middle line:84% up front in these familiar multistage blackboards, 00:16:17.310 --> 00:16:18.825 align:middle line:90% which I personally dearly miss. 00:16:18.825 --> 00:16:20.700 align:middle line:84% I wish I could get back to those blackboards. 00:16:20.700 --> 00:16:24.330 align:middle line:84% But look at the folks filling the room. 00:16:24.330 --> 00:16:27.570 align:middle line:84% And even from a quick glance, we can see they mostly come 00:16:27.570 --> 00:16:29.370 align:middle line:90% from one demographic type. 00:16:29.370 --> 00:16:32.285 align:middle line:84% And this was, as I'll say in the next few slides 00:16:32.285 --> 00:16:35.560 align:middle line:84% that we'll talk about, that was not unique to MIT. 00:16:35.560 --> 00:16:37.110 align:middle line:84% It was not unique to physics, but it 00:16:37.110 --> 00:16:40.140 align:middle line:84% became especially accentuated during this period 00:16:40.140 --> 00:16:43.890 align:middle line:84% of exponential growth in the study of physics. 00:16:43.890 --> 00:16:47.130 align:middle line:84% More and more, the field narrowed in the enrollment 00:16:47.130 --> 00:16:49.890 align:middle line:84% trends around basically white males, 00:16:49.890 --> 00:16:53.820 align:middle line:84% whereas that had been not always the trend before and not 00:16:53.820 --> 00:16:55.410 align:middle line:90% exclusively the trend now. 00:16:55.410 --> 00:16:57.540 align:middle line:84% But in this intermediate period, it 00:16:57.540 --> 00:17:00.480 align:middle line:84% was really, really a period of real consolidation 00:17:00.480 --> 00:17:03.690 align:middle line:84% or contraction of the range of the types of people 00:17:03.690 --> 00:17:06.089 align:middle line:84% who were otherwise flooding into physics. 00:17:06.089 --> 00:17:08.339 align:middle line:84% A couple of examples that I wrote about some years ago 00:17:08.339 --> 00:17:11.250 align:middle line:90% in an article that I wrote up. 00:17:11.250 --> 00:17:13.950 align:middle line:84% And other historians have found similar things 00:17:13.950 --> 00:17:15.430 align:middle line:90% in their own archive work. 00:17:15.430 --> 00:17:18.839 align:middle line:84% Here's an example that I found of a letter of recommendation 00:17:18.839 --> 00:17:21.900 align:middle line:84% being written by a Harvard physics professor 00:17:21.900 --> 00:17:24.720 align:middle line:84% on behalf of his recent PhD student looking 00:17:24.720 --> 00:17:27.030 align:middle line:84% for a job at one of the new national laboratories. 00:17:27.030 --> 00:17:28.860 align:middle line:90% It's a letter from 1954. 00:17:28.860 --> 00:17:32.047 align:middle line:84% The student had a traditional sounding Japanese last name. 00:17:32.047 --> 00:17:33.630 align:middle line:84% The letter goes on to explain this was 00:17:33.630 --> 00:17:35.400 align:middle line:90% a child of Japanese immigrants. 00:17:35.400 --> 00:17:40.613 align:middle line:84% The student was actually born in the US in Honolulu. 00:17:40.613 --> 00:17:42.030 align:middle line:84% But nonetheless, the letter writer 00:17:42.030 --> 00:17:45.180 align:middle line:84% felt the need to emphasize that despite this kind 00:17:45.180 --> 00:17:48.420 align:middle line:84% of Japanese sounding name, the applicant for this job 00:17:48.420 --> 00:17:50.340 align:middle line:84% actually was not just a US citizen 00:17:50.340 --> 00:17:52.290 align:middle line:84% but a kind of honorable US veteran 00:17:52.290 --> 00:17:54.863 align:middle line:84% who had fought in the US Armed Forces 00:17:54.863 --> 00:17:56.030 align:middle line:90% during the Second World War. 00:17:56.030 --> 00:17:59.570 align:middle line:84% It had to spell that out because of a kind of anticipation 00:17:59.570 --> 00:18:02.090 align:middle line:84% of a kind of anti Japanese sentiment 00:18:02.090 --> 00:18:03.950 align:middle line:90% so soon after the war. 00:18:03.950 --> 00:18:07.700 align:middle line:84% There are other notes I found in Berkeley's physics department 00:18:07.700 --> 00:18:10.850 align:middle line:84% archives from 1950, a kind of way 00:18:10.850 --> 00:18:14.182 align:middle line:84% to try to figure out who should be hired 00:18:14.182 --> 00:18:16.640 align:middle line:84% as the new faculty, some new faculty members in the physics 00:18:16.640 --> 00:18:17.300 align:middle line:90% department. 00:18:17.300 --> 00:18:19.670 align:middle line:84% And these are these kind of informal handwritten notes 00:18:19.670 --> 00:18:22.790 align:middle line:84% that mostly emphasize personal appearances using 00:18:22.790 --> 00:18:26.030 align:middle line:84% some pretty kind of flagrant stereotypes. 00:18:26.030 --> 00:18:28.280 align:middle line:84% They often talk in these notes about Jewish noses, 00:18:28.280 --> 00:18:31.460 align:middle line:84% Jewish features, Jewish type, whether the person who 00:18:31.460 --> 00:18:34.130 align:middle line:84% looked Jewish was or was not too pushy. 00:18:34.130 --> 00:18:36.500 align:middle line:84% And that got much more space in these notes 00:18:36.500 --> 00:18:38.660 align:middle line:84% than what the actual topic of research was 00:18:38.660 --> 00:18:40.370 align:middle line:84% or what kind of teacher the person might 00:18:40.370 --> 00:18:42.380 align:middle line:90% be in the classroom. 00:18:42.380 --> 00:18:44.150 align:middle line:84% We saw some of that even in some lectures 00:18:44.150 --> 00:18:47.090 align:middle line:84% ago about a kind of widespread anti-Semitism in many, many US 00:18:47.090 --> 00:18:48.320 align:middle line:90% universities before the war. 00:18:48.320 --> 00:18:50.720 align:middle line:84% It certainly didn't vanish after the war. 00:18:50.720 --> 00:18:53.220 align:middle line:84% Here's another example also it turns out from Berkeley. 00:18:53.220 --> 00:18:54.940 align:middle line:90% This was also not unique. 00:18:54.940 --> 00:18:57.670 align:middle line:84% The department head was answering a kind of query 00:18:57.670 --> 00:18:59.920 align:middle line:84% from I think in this case a Dean or someone like that. 00:18:59.920 --> 00:19:00.660 align:middle line:90% I can't remember. 00:19:00.660 --> 00:19:03.060 align:middle line:84% And the department head for Berkeley's physics department 00:19:03.060 --> 00:19:06.240 align:middle line:84% says, we have in the department head's words, no minority group 00:19:06.240 --> 00:19:07.530 align:middle line:90% problems in the department. 00:19:07.530 --> 00:19:09.630 align:middle line:84% So far as race is concerned, we have never yet 00:19:09.630 --> 00:19:12.420 align:middle line:84% had a Negro grad student in the department, hence 00:19:12.420 --> 00:19:14.760 align:middle line:84% that particular problem, so called problem, 00:19:14.760 --> 00:19:15.480 align:middle line:90% has never arisen. 00:19:15.480 --> 00:19:17.130 align:middle line:90% I just find this extraordinary. 00:19:17.130 --> 00:19:20.460 align:middle line:84% Berkeley, as I think you know, was then, 00:19:20.460 --> 00:19:25.350 align:middle line:84% is now a public University in a very dense metropolitan area 00:19:25.350 --> 00:19:28.770 align:middle line:84% that also was at this point the country's largest graduate 00:19:28.770 --> 00:19:29.660 align:middle line:90% program in physics. 00:19:29.660 --> 00:19:33.240 align:middle line:84% They had well over 100 grad students at a time enrolled 00:19:33.240 --> 00:19:35.370 align:middle line:84% and that number kept rising during this period. 00:19:35.370 --> 00:19:38.408 align:middle line:84% And yet the department head could state, 00:19:38.408 --> 00:19:40.950 align:middle line:84% I don't want to say proudly, but could state matter-of-factly 00:19:40.950 --> 00:19:44.035 align:middle line:84% that they've never had a so called minority 00:19:44.035 --> 00:19:46.410 align:middle line:84% problem because they haven't had any minorities, at least 00:19:46.410 --> 00:19:48.900 align:middle line:84% no African Americans in the department. 00:19:48.900 --> 00:19:50.580 align:middle line:90% I just find that extraordinary. 00:19:50.580 --> 00:19:52.075 align:middle line:90% One last example. 00:19:52.075 --> 00:19:53.700 align:middle line:84% In case these were a little too subtle, 00:19:53.700 --> 00:19:54.870 align:middle line:84% I don't think they're very subtle, 00:19:54.870 --> 00:19:57.330 align:middle line:84% here's another one I found in the archives some years ago. 00:19:57.330 --> 00:20:00.270 align:middle line:84% A job ad for a new physics instructor at the US Naval 00:20:00.270 --> 00:20:01.980 align:middle line:90% Academy in Annapolis. 00:20:01.980 --> 00:20:04.050 align:middle line:84% And it actually said in the ad things 00:20:04.050 --> 00:20:07.080 align:middle line:84% that people literally can't write anymore. 00:20:07.080 --> 00:20:09.540 align:middle line:84% It said literally don't even apply 00:20:09.540 --> 00:20:12.900 align:middle line:84% unless you are quote "white male and an American citizen." 00:20:12.900 --> 00:20:17.280 align:middle line:84% So this was a kind of assumption throughout all of these notes 00:20:17.280 --> 00:20:19.860 align:middle line:84% that the people entering the field either as grad students 00:20:19.860 --> 00:20:21.930 align:middle line:84% or as young faculty would be male, 00:20:21.930 --> 00:20:27.840 align:middle line:84% they'd be men, but of a particular kind of background. 00:20:27.840 --> 00:20:31.237 align:middle line:84% And then we can ask what about people who weren't male? 00:20:31.237 --> 00:20:33.570 align:middle line:84% And here again, we had the reading from Professor Evelyn 00:20:33.570 --> 00:20:34.327 align:middle line:90% Fox Keller. 00:20:34.327 --> 00:20:36.660 align:middle line:84% And I just want to share, put that in a bit more context 00:20:36.660 --> 00:20:37.590 align:middle line:90% as well. 00:20:37.590 --> 00:20:40.140 align:middle line:84% Also again, research I've done in many other stories by now 00:20:40.140 --> 00:20:42.100 align:middle line:90% have found very similar things. 00:20:42.100 --> 00:20:45.090 align:middle line:84% So throughout the 1930s in the US physics community, 00:20:45.090 --> 00:20:47.850 align:middle line:84% women had accounted for about 1/6 00:20:47.850 --> 00:20:50.490 align:middle line:84% of the students who earned undergraduate degrees 00:20:50.490 --> 00:20:53.610 align:middle line:84% in physics each year during the '30s, so before the Second 00:20:53.610 --> 00:20:54.270 align:middle line:90% World War. 00:20:54.270 --> 00:20:59.580 align:middle line:84% Not 1/2, but about 1/6 were getting undergraduate degrees. 00:20:59.580 --> 00:21:02.370 align:middle line:84% And that proportion fell by a factor of 4 00:21:02.370 --> 00:21:03.730 align:middle line:90% during the postwar decades. 00:21:03.730 --> 00:21:07.420 align:middle line:84% So instead of 16% each year, it fell to 4% very, 00:21:07.420 --> 00:21:09.930 align:middle line:84% very rapidly after the end of the Second World War. 00:21:09.930 --> 00:21:14.070 align:middle line:84% Meanwhile, the proportion in the US of women who had earned 00:21:14.070 --> 00:21:17.130 align:middle line:84% PhDs before the war, PhDs in physics, had never been larger. 00:21:17.130 --> 00:21:19.470 align:middle line:84% It had only been about average about 4%, 00:21:19.470 --> 00:21:23.640 align:middle line:84% held pretty steady throughout the '30s at 4%, 1 out of 25. 00:21:23.640 --> 00:21:25.410 align:middle line:84% And that already small proportion 00:21:25.410 --> 00:21:28.900 align:middle line:84% fell in half again during that postwar decade. 00:21:28.900 --> 00:21:32.670 align:middle line:84% So from a trickle to barely even measurable practically 00:21:32.670 --> 00:21:36.930 align:middle line:84% in terms of just the throughput through these now 00:21:36.930 --> 00:21:38.760 align:middle line:90% large, booming departments. 00:21:38.760 --> 00:21:41.010 align:middle line:84% There's also this part I found even more 00:21:41.010 --> 00:21:42.780 align:middle line:90% interesting, troubling. 00:21:42.780 --> 00:21:46.320 align:middle line:84% There was a kind of ambivalence among many physicists 00:21:46.320 --> 00:21:51.030 align:middle line:84% about what to do about women in or near or around physics. 00:21:51.030 --> 00:21:52.770 align:middle line:84% If there weren't very many women who 00:21:52.770 --> 00:21:55.170 align:middle line:84% were students formally in physics, 00:21:55.170 --> 00:22:00.690 align:middle line:84% what about the male students who were assumed to be heterosexual 00:22:00.690 --> 00:22:03.070 align:middle line:84% and having relationships with women? 00:22:03.070 --> 00:22:05.220 align:middle line:84% What about the women who were dating 00:22:05.220 --> 00:22:06.900 align:middle line:84% or married to the male physicists, 00:22:06.900 --> 00:22:08.880 align:middle line:84% either young grad students or young faculty? 00:22:08.880 --> 00:22:11.130 align:middle line:84% And again, there's a kind of back and forth. 00:22:11.130 --> 00:22:13.297 align:middle line:84% Some people say it's great that so many male physics 00:22:13.297 --> 00:22:15.505 align:middle line:84% students are married because it gives them stability. 00:22:15.505 --> 00:22:16.380 align:middle line:90% Now they can focus. 00:22:16.380 --> 00:22:17.640 align:middle line:84% I don't know where they get that idea from. 00:22:17.640 --> 00:22:18.510 align:middle line:90% That was one idea. 00:22:18.510 --> 00:22:20.760 align:middle line:84% On the other hand, you see these things like the women 00:22:20.760 --> 00:22:23.490 align:middle line:90% are cast as being too demanding. 00:22:23.490 --> 00:22:26.680 align:middle line:84% The wives want the husbands home early. 00:22:26.680 --> 00:22:28.380 align:middle line:84% I wrote a lot about these advertisements 00:22:28.380 --> 00:22:30.660 align:middle line:84% for physics positions in the main kind 00:22:30.660 --> 00:22:33.060 align:middle line:84% of trade journal of the time, Physics Today, which 00:22:33.060 --> 00:22:37.050 align:middle line:84% were mostly advertising about the kind of great kind 00:22:37.050 --> 00:22:40.260 align:middle line:84% of suburban comfortable middle class lifestyle 00:22:40.260 --> 00:22:42.048 align:middle line:84% rather than we have the best equipment. 00:22:42.048 --> 00:22:43.590 align:middle line:84% We study really interesting problems. 00:22:43.590 --> 00:22:45.880 align:middle line:84% It was all about the male physicist 00:22:45.880 --> 00:22:49.845 align:middle line:84% so called breadwinner can make a nice life for the family 00:22:49.845 --> 00:22:51.970 align:middle line:84% while the wife presumably stays home with the kids. 00:22:51.970 --> 00:22:54.490 align:middle line:84% That was how you would advertise to get the best physicists. 00:22:54.490 --> 00:22:55.480 align:middle line:90% This photograph I love. 00:22:55.480 --> 00:22:57.730 align:middle line:84% This is from, again, Berkeley's archives. 00:22:57.730 --> 00:23:02.530 align:middle line:84% This was a get acquainted tea for the wives of new physicists 00:23:02.530 --> 00:23:05.770 align:middle line:84% who had joined the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. 00:23:05.770 --> 00:23:08.530 align:middle line:84% And what I love is that the greeting line here 00:23:08.530 --> 00:23:11.260 align:middle line:84% are the wives standing in rank order of their husbands 00:23:11.260 --> 00:23:11.870 align:middle line:90% at the lab. 00:23:11.870 --> 00:23:14.170 align:middle line:84% So I can never remember if it's here or here. 00:23:14.170 --> 00:23:16.165 align:middle line:84% But one of the endpoints was the wife 00:23:16.165 --> 00:23:18.040 align:middle line:84% of the director of the laboratory at the time 00:23:18.040 --> 00:23:20.207 align:middle line:84% and this was like the wife of the associate director 00:23:20.207 --> 00:23:22.030 align:middle line:90% and so on. 00:23:22.030 --> 00:23:25.030 align:middle line:84% Meanwhile, John Slater, who was for a very long time 00:23:25.030 --> 00:23:26.950 align:middle line:84% the department head of physics here at MIT, 00:23:26.950 --> 00:23:28.750 align:middle line:84% really helped build the modern department 00:23:28.750 --> 00:23:31.540 align:middle line:84% and did many things that he set in motion that we now 00:23:31.540 --> 00:23:32.657 align:middle line:90% kind of take for granted. 00:23:32.657 --> 00:23:34.990 align:middle line:84% On the other hand, he was also capable of writing things 00:23:34.990 --> 00:23:37.240 align:middle line:84% like this in the late '60s in Physics Today 00:23:37.240 --> 00:23:42.220 align:middle line:84% where he's not so excited about the presence of so many wives 00:23:42.220 --> 00:23:45.072 align:middle line:84% just seemingly distracting the male physics grad students. 00:23:45.072 --> 00:23:47.280 align:middle line:84% So he writes that present students, by which he means 00:23:47.280 --> 00:23:49.050 align:middle line:84% male physics grad students, find it 00:23:49.050 --> 00:23:50.460 align:middle line:90% harder to settle down to work. 00:23:50.460 --> 00:23:52.380 align:middle line:84% Wives and babies take up a lot of time 00:23:52.380 --> 00:23:54.180 align:middle line:84% that my generation put into physics. 00:23:54.180 --> 00:23:55.980 align:middle line:84% There's very little evidence of actually 00:23:55.980 --> 00:23:58.230 align:middle line:84% there was marriage rates very different at that point, 00:23:58.230 --> 00:23:59.760 align:middle line:90% but this is his nostalgia. 00:23:59.760 --> 00:24:03.150 align:middle line:84% The wives, it is true, helped to type their husbands thesis. 00:24:03.150 --> 00:24:04.650 align:middle line:84% But in the older days, the necessity 00:24:04.650 --> 00:24:06.540 align:middle line:84% of doing this ourselves made us learn typing. 00:24:06.540 --> 00:24:09.240 align:middle line:84% I mean, that one just kind of makes me laugh. 00:24:09.240 --> 00:24:11.640 align:middle line:84% It's not even a benefit to have secretarial support. 00:24:11.640 --> 00:24:13.557 align:middle line:84% The men should learn how to type on their own. 00:24:13.557 --> 00:24:16.980 align:middle line:84% He's just frazzled by the fact that women are not 00:24:16.980 --> 00:24:19.470 align:middle line:84% studying physics but they're also not somehow 00:24:19.470 --> 00:24:22.140 align:middle line:84% leaving the male physics grad students alone. 00:24:22.140 --> 00:24:24.760 align:middle line:90% It's really remarkable. 00:24:24.760 --> 00:24:26.477 align:middle line:84% So I find that helpful context, then, 00:24:26.477 --> 00:24:28.560 align:middle line:84% when we come to this reading that we had for today 00:24:28.560 --> 00:24:31.170 align:middle line:84% from my colleague, Professor Evelyn Fox Keller, which 00:24:31.170 --> 00:24:34.470 align:middle line:84% is a remarkable scholar who's gone on to win 00:24:34.470 --> 00:24:36.780 align:middle line:90% more awards than I could list. 00:24:36.780 --> 00:24:39.370 align:middle line:84% She retired from MIT a couple of years ago. 00:24:39.370 --> 00:24:41.430 align:middle line:84% So she wrote this reminiscence kind 00:24:41.430 --> 00:24:44.250 align:middle line:84% of later in her own career of her experiences 00:24:44.250 --> 00:24:47.410 align:middle line:84% as a grad student in theoretical physics at Harvard 00:24:47.410 --> 00:24:48.880 align:middle line:90% starting in the late 1950s. 00:24:48.880 --> 00:24:51.520 align:middle line:84% I think she entered around 1958, give or take, 00:24:51.520 --> 00:24:53.338 align:middle line:90% if I remember correctly. 00:24:53.338 --> 00:24:54.880 align:middle line:84% So at that time, again, this is based 00:24:54.880 --> 00:24:57.340 align:middle line:84% on my own archival research, Harvard's department 00:24:57.340 --> 00:24:59.680 align:middle line:84% also by that point had grown to have about 100 PhD 00:24:59.680 --> 00:25:01.030 align:middle line:90% students enrolled total. 00:25:01.030 --> 00:25:04.060 align:middle line:84% Not 100 new ones per year but across the approximately five 00:25:04.060 --> 00:25:06.490 align:middle line:84% years of grad school, they had about 100 at a time. 00:25:06.490 --> 00:25:10.420 align:middle line:84% And during the 1950s, the number of women PhD students 00:25:10.420 --> 00:25:13.660 align:middle line:84% in physics at Harvard ranged between three and seven. 00:25:13.660 --> 00:25:17.300 align:middle line:84% So it was fewer than 10% at any given year. 00:25:17.300 --> 00:25:19.240 align:middle line:84% And this is something that Evelyn writes about 00:25:19.240 --> 00:25:21.850 align:middle line:84% in her piece and I'd found independently in the archives. 00:25:21.850 --> 00:25:23.800 align:middle line:84% The women who entered grad school 00:25:23.800 --> 00:25:26.320 align:middle line:84% to study for a PhD in physics at Harvard 00:25:26.320 --> 00:25:28.870 align:middle line:84% would apply to Harvard's department of physics. 00:25:28.870 --> 00:25:31.450 align:middle line:84% If they were accepted, then their files were transferred 00:25:31.450 --> 00:25:35.200 align:middle line:84% to a make believe shell game called the Radcliffe Graduate 00:25:35.200 --> 00:25:35.710 align:middle line:90% School. 00:25:35.710 --> 00:25:38.290 align:middle line:84% At the time, Radcliffe was, of course, a separate all women 00:25:38.290 --> 00:25:39.910 align:middle line:84% undergraduate institution that did not 00:25:39.910 --> 00:25:41.740 align:middle line:84% have its own physics department and did not 00:25:41.740 --> 00:25:43.090 align:middle line:90% grant PhDs in physics. 00:25:43.090 --> 00:25:46.960 align:middle line:84% So the women applicants, like the male applicants, 00:25:46.960 --> 00:25:48.460 align:middle line:84% would apply to Harvard's department 00:25:48.460 --> 00:25:49.930 align:middle line:90% of physics for graduate study. 00:25:49.930 --> 00:25:51.730 align:middle line:84% And then their papers, their files, 00:25:51.730 --> 00:25:54.370 align:middle line:84% would literally be segregated to be shipped off 00:25:54.370 --> 00:25:57.320 align:middle line:84% to be physically housed in a different building. 00:25:57.320 --> 00:25:59.840 align:middle line:84% And as Evelyn recounts, that actually could matter. 00:25:59.840 --> 00:26:02.278 align:middle line:84% It wasn't just that they were treated differently. 00:26:02.278 --> 00:26:04.570 align:middle line:84% That could mean they wouldn't get certain announcements 00:26:04.570 --> 00:26:07.150 align:middle line:84% for when the final exam would be for a graduate level course, 00:26:07.150 --> 00:26:09.028 align:middle line:90% as Evelyn recounts in her piece. 00:26:09.028 --> 00:26:11.320 align:middle line:84% Of course, she talks about many other microaggressions, 00:26:11.320 --> 00:26:13.630 align:middle line:84% what we might even call mezzo aggressions. 00:26:13.630 --> 00:26:14.920 align:middle line:90% Some of them weren't so micro. 00:26:14.920 --> 00:26:16.880 align:middle line:84% And the kind of climate or atmospherics 00:26:16.880 --> 00:26:18.130 align:middle line:90% in the department at the time. 00:26:18.130 --> 00:26:19.750 align:middle line:84% So I just want to give background 00:26:19.750 --> 00:26:24.610 align:middle line:84% she was she was not alone and other archival materials 00:26:24.610 --> 00:26:27.100 align:middle line:84% from the time suggest similar kinds of experiences 00:26:27.100 --> 00:26:28.640 align:middle line:90% for other people in the field. 00:26:28.640 --> 00:26:30.790 align:middle line:84% The American Institute of Physics compiled data 00:26:30.790 --> 00:26:34.510 align:middle line:84% in the early '60s and they found, again, 00:26:34.510 --> 00:26:36.670 align:middle line:84% maybe not surprising what we now know today, 00:26:36.670 --> 00:26:40.390 align:middle line:84% that the few women who did pursue careers in physics 00:26:40.390 --> 00:26:43.180 align:middle line:84% were paid much, much, much less than men 00:26:43.180 --> 00:26:46.520 align:middle line:84% in the field who had achieved the same level of education. 00:26:46.520 --> 00:26:48.020 align:middle line:84% And here are the other things that I 00:26:48.020 --> 00:26:49.562 align:middle line:84% found in some of my own archival work 00:26:49.562 --> 00:26:52.150 align:middle line:84% that still frankly kind of haunts me. 00:26:52.150 --> 00:26:53.900 align:middle line:84% There was a tradition in many departments, 00:26:53.900 --> 00:26:56.700 align:middle line:84% at Harvard's department and many around the country, 00:26:56.700 --> 00:26:59.450 align:middle line:84% including University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 00:26:59.450 --> 00:27:01.250 align:middle line:90% of having these informal skits. 00:27:01.250 --> 00:27:05.390 align:middle line:84% Sometimes the grad students do a skit to have a gentle roast 00:27:05.390 --> 00:27:07.070 align:middle line:90% to tease their own faculty. 00:27:07.070 --> 00:27:08.690 align:middle line:84% Sometimes the junior faculty do a skit 00:27:08.690 --> 00:27:11.032 align:middle line:84% to tease their senior faculty, which is not a good idea 00:27:11.032 --> 00:27:11.990 align:middle line:90% if you're tenure track. 00:27:11.990 --> 00:27:13.940 align:middle line:84% Anyway, so I found these transcripts 00:27:13.940 --> 00:27:17.180 align:middle line:84% of these faculty skits from physics 00:27:17.180 --> 00:27:19.273 align:middle line:90% from Urbana in the early '60s. 00:27:19.273 --> 00:27:21.440 align:middle line:84% And they were joking one year, seemingly innocently, 00:27:21.440 --> 00:27:24.440 align:middle line:84% just kind of blowing off steam, about how they should handle 00:27:24.440 --> 00:27:25.880 align:middle line:90% admissions to the PhD program. 00:27:25.880 --> 00:27:27.980 align:middle line:84% And they said the male applicants should 00:27:27.980 --> 00:27:29.370 align:middle line:90% submit their credit ratings. 00:27:29.370 --> 00:27:31.880 align:middle line:90% Do you have a strong FICO score? 00:27:31.880 --> 00:27:35.120 align:middle line:84% And the women applicants, excuse me, the girls, 00:27:35.120 --> 00:27:37.910 align:middle line:84% as written there, should submit photos of themselves 00:27:37.910 --> 00:27:40.170 align:middle line:84% in bathing suits and give their critical measurements. 00:27:40.170 --> 00:27:42.290 align:middle line:90% And again, that wasn't unique. 00:27:42.290 --> 00:27:44.420 align:middle line:84% You see the other ads from physics today 00:27:44.420 --> 00:27:47.180 align:middle line:84% for a kind of optics manufacturer 00:27:47.180 --> 00:27:51.182 align:middle line:84% that has really good polarizing lenses. 00:27:51.182 --> 00:27:53.390 align:middle line:84% And so instead of just saying we have great equipment 00:27:53.390 --> 00:27:55.270 align:middle line:84% and cool research projects, they put 00:27:55.270 --> 00:27:59.630 align:middle line:84% a so called pinup girl woman in basically 00:27:59.630 --> 00:28:02.330 align:middle line:84% sort of like a bathing suit to show off 00:28:02.330 --> 00:28:05.670 align:middle line:90% the optics of the company. 00:28:05.670 --> 00:28:08.810 align:middle line:84% So again, this was obviously not unique to physics departments 00:28:08.810 --> 00:28:10.280 align:middle line:84% in the United States at the time. 00:28:10.280 --> 00:28:14.030 align:middle line:84% It's reflective of but also kind of amplifying 00:28:14.030 --> 00:28:19.370 align:middle line:84% some very pervasive kind of cultural stereotypes or notions 00:28:19.370 --> 00:28:23.280 align:middle line:84% to which universities were hardly immune. 00:28:23.280 --> 00:28:25.970 align:middle line:84% And we see a kind of, I think, a kind of amplification 00:28:25.970 --> 00:28:28.280 align:middle line:84% of these things in physics departments during exactly 00:28:28.280 --> 00:28:28.880 align:middle line:90% this period. 00:28:28.880 --> 00:28:32.630 align:middle line:84% I find Evelyn's piece especially evocative of that, 00:28:32.630 --> 00:28:34.070 align:middle line:90% though hardly unique. 00:28:34.070 --> 00:28:36.860 align:middle line:84% So my last thing to say on this first part about big science 00:28:36.860 --> 00:28:38.610 align:middle line:90% meaning big enrollments. 00:28:38.610 --> 00:28:40.260 align:middle line:84% So it's really critical to keep in mind 00:28:40.260 --> 00:28:42.020 align:middle line:84% these were enrollments of a certain kind. 00:28:42.020 --> 00:28:45.150 align:middle line:84% Enrollments were growing exponentially faster in physics 00:28:45.150 --> 00:28:47.700 align:middle line:84% than in any other field across the American academy. 00:28:47.700 --> 00:28:51.390 align:middle line:84% And yet it was really as the numbers were growing, 00:28:51.390 --> 00:28:55.000 align:middle line:84% the demographics were actually winnowing very, very, 00:28:55.000 --> 00:28:58.230 align:middle line:84% very quickly and looked nothing like either 00:28:58.230 --> 00:29:00.810 align:middle line:84% what had come before or indeed what has slowly 00:29:00.810 --> 00:29:02.860 align:middle line:90% come to open up since. 00:29:02.860 --> 00:29:04.860 align:middle line:84% So let me pause there and ask for some questions 00:29:04.860 --> 00:29:07.830 align:middle line:84% and then we'll go to the next part. 00:29:07.830 --> 00:29:09.090 align:middle line:90% Any questions on any of that? 00:29:09.090 --> 00:29:14.760 align:middle line:90% 00:29:14.760 --> 00:29:15.260 align:middle line:90% DAS. 00:29:15.260 --> 00:29:17.135 align:middle line:84% Why is there a sawtooth pattern of the number 00:29:17.135 --> 00:29:18.170 align:middle line:90% of papers released? 00:29:18.170 --> 00:29:22.010 align:middle line:84% That might be referring to that early plot 00:29:22.010 --> 00:29:23.810 align:middle line:84% from Paul Forman about the number of papers 00:29:23.810 --> 00:29:25.370 align:middle line:90% at the meetings. 00:29:25.370 --> 00:29:27.080 align:middle line:84% I think there were a lot of disruptions 00:29:27.080 --> 00:29:30.475 align:middle line:84% for things like the Second World War and the Korean War. 00:29:30.475 --> 00:29:32.100 align:middle line:84% I'd have to go back to the exact dates, 00:29:32.100 --> 00:29:34.225 align:middle line:84% but I think there were other kind of worldly events 00:29:34.225 --> 00:29:36.928 align:middle line:84% that would affect the kind of annual attendance. 00:29:36.928 --> 00:29:38.720 align:middle line:84% But I can go back and double check on that. 00:29:38.720 --> 00:29:43.390 align:middle line:90% 00:29:43.390 --> 00:29:44.297 align:middle line:90% OK, other comments. 00:29:44.297 --> 00:29:46.630 align:middle line:84% Benjamin asks, did I just say that physics were expected 00:29:46.630 --> 00:29:47.200 align:middle line:90% to be in relationships? 00:29:47.200 --> 00:29:48.440 align:middle line:90% It's really interesting. 00:29:48.440 --> 00:29:51.980 align:middle line:84% So sometimes department heads would 00:29:51.980 --> 00:29:55.220 align:middle line:84% celebrate that more and more of their, again, overwhelmingly 00:29:55.220 --> 00:29:59.642 align:middle line:84% male grad students were getting married to women. 00:29:59.642 --> 00:30:01.100 align:middle line:84% And they thought this was adorable. 00:30:01.100 --> 00:30:02.225 align:middle line:90% They'd have little parties. 00:30:02.225 --> 00:30:03.683 align:middle line:84% The Berkeley department head called 00:30:03.683 --> 00:30:06.230 align:middle line:84% it an outbreak of marriage-itis, as if it was like a disease, 00:30:06.230 --> 00:30:07.530 align:middle line:90% but he was cute about it. 00:30:07.530 --> 00:30:09.470 align:middle line:84% We should have a party, we'll have cake. 00:30:09.470 --> 00:30:12.830 align:middle line:84% So sometimes they eyed this very as a cause for celebration. 00:30:12.830 --> 00:30:14.660 align:middle line:84% And other times they say no, no, no. 00:30:14.660 --> 00:30:16.010 align:middle line:90% Our students are too distracted. 00:30:16.010 --> 00:30:18.950 align:middle line:84% Back in my day, all we did as a kind of monkish thing, 00:30:18.950 --> 00:30:21.260 align:middle line:84% they would say, we were kind of celibate monks 00:30:21.260 --> 00:30:23.390 align:middle line:84% and only studied physics, which is not borne out 00:30:23.390 --> 00:30:25.730 align:middle line:84% by the existing data at all, but it 00:30:25.730 --> 00:30:29.602 align:middle line:84% was how it was often cast by not all but by some physicists who 00:30:29.602 --> 00:30:31.310 align:middle line:84% were then later in their careers thinking 00:30:31.310 --> 00:30:34.100 align:middle line:84% back to their own experiences from the '30s. 00:30:34.100 --> 00:30:35.630 align:middle line:84% Fisher, you say on the graph physics 00:30:35.630 --> 00:30:37.422 align:middle line:84% PhDs over time, what caused a massive drop? 00:30:37.422 --> 00:30:38.690 align:middle line:90% Yeah, we'll get to that. 00:30:38.690 --> 00:30:40.108 align:middle line:84% I would think Vietnam is correct. 00:30:40.108 --> 00:30:42.150 align:middle line:84% That is a large, large, large part of the answer. 00:30:42.150 --> 00:30:43.310 align:middle line:84% But we will talk about that actually a little 00:30:43.310 --> 00:30:44.570 align:middle line:90% bit later in today's class. 00:30:44.570 --> 00:30:46.140 align:middle line:90% It's a great, great question. 00:30:46.140 --> 00:30:49.165 align:middle line:90% Any other questions about that? 00:30:49.165 --> 00:30:50.540 align:middle line:84% I mean, one of the main takeaways 00:30:50.540 --> 00:30:52.850 align:middle line:84% is when people talk about big science, that 00:30:52.850 --> 00:30:54.808 align:middle line:90% might mean big money. 00:30:54.808 --> 00:30:56.600 align:middle line:84% And remember, it's not just money, budgets, 00:30:56.600 --> 00:30:57.600 align:middle line:90% but actually the source. 00:30:57.600 --> 00:31:00.260 align:middle line:84% And the US had really collapsed to these defense agencies 00:31:00.260 --> 00:31:01.340 align:middle line:90% at the federal level. 00:31:01.340 --> 00:31:02.420 align:middle line:90% Big machines. 00:31:02.420 --> 00:31:06.740 align:middle line:84% And I love those pictures of these enormous cyclotrons 00:31:06.740 --> 00:31:09.140 align:middle line:84% and synchrotrons swallowing up the people 00:31:09.140 --> 00:31:10.520 align:middle line:90% wearing their neckties. 00:31:10.520 --> 00:31:11.750 align:middle line:90% And then big enrollments. 00:31:11.750 --> 00:31:13.730 align:middle line:84% That enrollments part I really think 00:31:13.730 --> 00:31:15.920 align:middle line:84% we have to keep the asterisk in mind. 00:31:15.920 --> 00:31:18.080 align:middle line:84% Some people wanted lots and lots and lots of people 00:31:18.080 --> 00:31:19.070 align:middle line:90% to study physics. 00:31:19.070 --> 00:31:21.740 align:middle line:84% Let's ask a little bit more about who. 00:31:21.740 --> 00:31:23.790 align:middle line:90% Lots of what kinds of people? 00:31:23.790 --> 00:31:27.350 align:middle line:84% And so I should say that last part I meant to queue up. 00:31:27.350 --> 00:31:29.630 align:middle line:84% I have some ideas about why it was so 00:31:29.630 --> 00:31:34.430 align:middle line:84% narrowing demographically or stereotypically 00:31:34.430 --> 00:31:36.020 align:middle line:84% during that period, and that does 00:31:36.020 --> 00:31:39.150 align:middle line:84% have to do with the part we'll talk about next in class. 00:31:39.150 --> 00:31:44.570 align:middle line:84% So I don't think it was either accidental or unexplainable why 00:31:44.570 --> 00:31:46.080 align:middle line:84% that demographic narrowing happened 00:31:46.080 --> 00:31:47.330 align:middle line:90% amidst the exponential growth. 00:31:47.330 --> 00:31:49.680 align:middle line:84% And that's also I think at least in part 00:31:49.680 --> 00:31:51.105 align:middle line:90% a kind of Cold War story. 00:31:51.105 --> 00:31:53.940 align:middle line:90% 00:31:53.940 --> 00:31:56.415 align:middle line:84% DA says that it might have been Slater's own lifestyle. 00:31:56.415 --> 00:31:58.290 align:middle line:84% I read somewhere that he was not very social. 00:31:58.290 --> 00:31:59.332 align:middle line:90% That absolutely could be. 00:31:59.332 --> 00:32:01.530 align:middle line:84% There's a lot of personal idiosyncrasy 00:32:01.530 --> 00:32:03.810 align:middle line:84% to bear in mind with these reminiscences. 00:32:03.810 --> 00:32:05.940 align:middle line:84% But as I say, sometimes it's just 00:32:05.940 --> 00:32:08.730 align:middle line:84% fake nostalgia or real nostalgia even though it was never 00:32:08.730 --> 00:32:10.120 align:middle line:90% quite that way at the time. 00:32:10.120 --> 00:32:11.430 align:middle line:90% We can now independently check. 00:32:11.430 --> 00:32:13.770 align:middle line:84% And also it is the mixture of the usual kind of play 00:32:13.770 --> 00:32:15.567 align:middle line:84% of personalities and who's recalling what, 00:32:15.567 --> 00:32:16.650 align:middle line:90% when, and in what context. 00:32:16.650 --> 00:32:18.025 align:middle line:84% I absolutely agree with that, DA. 00:32:18.025 --> 00:32:19.620 align:middle line:90% I think that's exactly right. 00:32:19.620 --> 00:32:22.410 align:middle line:84% OK, let me press on to the next part. 00:32:22.410 --> 00:32:25.680 align:middle line:84% I did not assign a reading squarely in this next part, 00:32:25.680 --> 00:32:27.550 align:middle line:84% but I have written quite a lot about it. 00:32:27.550 --> 00:32:29.220 align:middle line:84% So if people are curious, I'd be glad to point you 00:32:29.220 --> 00:32:31.178 align:middle line:84% to some more readings if this just kind of gets 00:32:31.178 --> 00:32:33.210 align:middle line:90% you interested. 00:32:33.210 --> 00:32:35.440 align:middle line:84% So let's talk about this term manpower. 00:32:35.440 --> 00:32:41.070 align:middle line:84% And by now the man part might not be so surprising. 00:32:41.070 --> 00:32:43.200 align:middle line:84% And I do think that's relevant for this next phase 00:32:43.200 --> 00:32:46.590 align:middle line:84% to help us account for this really extraordinary, 00:32:46.590 --> 00:32:49.200 align:middle line:84% unprecedented growth in the numbers of people entering 00:32:49.200 --> 00:32:49.980 align:middle line:90% the field. 00:32:49.980 --> 00:32:51.908 align:middle line:84% Manpower was originally a military term. 00:32:51.908 --> 00:32:53.700 align:middle line:84% It really meant things like so called boots 00:32:53.700 --> 00:32:56.550 align:middle line:84% on the ground, the number of, say, 00:32:56.550 --> 00:33:00.180 align:middle line:84% members of the armed forces who could mount 00:33:00.180 --> 00:33:01.320 align:middle line:90% an invasion such like that. 00:33:01.320 --> 00:33:04.590 align:middle line:84% And this kind of military force term, manpower, 00:33:04.590 --> 00:33:08.400 align:middle line:84% was very rapidly taken over to describe 00:33:08.400 --> 00:33:10.560 align:middle line:84% what seemed like a very pressing at times 00:33:10.560 --> 00:33:13.170 align:middle line:84% kind of hysterical concern in the United States 00:33:13.170 --> 00:33:15.090 align:middle line:84% to make lots and lots of new scientists. 00:33:15.090 --> 00:33:16.590 align:middle line:84% That almost always meant physicists. 00:33:16.590 --> 00:33:19.140 align:middle line:84% Make lots and lots of new scientists 00:33:19.140 --> 00:33:23.310 align:middle line:84% so you could expand the ranks of so called scientific manpower. 00:33:23.310 --> 00:33:24.340 align:middle line:90% Here's one example. 00:33:24.340 --> 00:33:26.670 align:middle line:90% Many examples beyond these. 00:33:26.670 --> 00:33:28.800 align:middle line:84% Henry Barton, shown here, was at the time 00:33:28.800 --> 00:33:31.680 align:middle line:84% the president of the American Institute of Physics 00:33:31.680 --> 00:33:32.970 align:middle line:90% very soon after the war. 00:33:32.970 --> 00:33:35.320 align:middle line:84% He was saying in a time of national emergency, 00:33:35.320 --> 00:33:39.090 align:middle line:84% including this period after the war, this unsteady developing 00:33:39.090 --> 00:33:42.060 align:middle line:84% Cold War with the Soviet Union, this country 00:33:42.060 --> 00:33:44.370 align:middle line:84% would think nothing of spending $1 million 00:33:44.370 --> 00:33:48.000 align:middle line:84% to survey developing-- conserve a short commodity 00:33:48.000 --> 00:33:50.120 align:middle line:90% like natural rubber or tin. 00:33:50.120 --> 00:33:52.670 align:middle line:84% In other places, people compared physics grad students 00:33:52.670 --> 00:33:55.280 align:middle line:84% to pigs and cattle, which I thought was telling. 00:33:55.280 --> 00:33:57.590 align:middle line:84% Highly trained and able human resources 00:33:57.590 --> 00:33:59.640 align:middle line:84% viewed as a commodity are far more important. 00:33:59.640 --> 00:34:01.460 align:middle line:84% So he was urging the federal government 00:34:01.460 --> 00:34:03.110 align:middle line:84% to spend even more money or at least 00:34:03.110 --> 00:34:09.139 align:middle line:84% help the AIP do very extensive surveys of the kind of capacity 00:34:09.139 --> 00:34:11.540 align:middle line:84% within the country to make lots and lots of newly trained 00:34:11.540 --> 00:34:13.370 align:middle line:90% physicists very quickly. 00:34:13.370 --> 00:34:16.550 align:middle line:84% Likewise, Henry Dewolf Smyth, department head 00:34:16.550 --> 00:34:20.179 align:middle line:84% of physics at Princeton and an accomplished nuclear physicist, 00:34:20.179 --> 00:34:23.090 align:middle line:84% was by this point a leading member of the Atomic Energy 00:34:23.090 --> 00:34:24.389 align:middle line:90% Commission as well. 00:34:24.389 --> 00:34:27.110 align:middle line:84% And he gave a series of speeches and lectures 00:34:27.110 --> 00:34:30.020 align:middle line:84% on this topic to Congress, to public lectures, 00:34:30.020 --> 00:34:32.210 align:middle line:90% to civic groups. 00:34:32.210 --> 00:34:34.190 align:middle line:84% Again, saying things like scientific manpower 00:34:34.190 --> 00:34:36.590 align:middle line:84% was a war commodity, a tool of war, 00:34:36.590 --> 00:34:40.280 align:middle line:84% a major war asset, and hence had to be stockpiled and rationed, 00:34:40.280 --> 00:34:44.449 align:middle line:84% again, like rubber, tin, or gasoline during the recent war. 00:34:44.449 --> 00:34:47.000 align:middle line:84% And here he's referring to scientific manpower 00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:50.550 align:middle line:84% by which he then goes on to say things like PhD students 00:34:50.550 --> 00:34:51.727 align:middle line:90% in physics. 00:34:51.727 --> 00:34:54.060 align:middle line:84% So we come back to this plot that I was showing earlier, 00:34:54.060 --> 00:34:57.150 align:middle line:90% the PhDs in physics over time. 00:34:57.150 --> 00:35:00.780 align:middle line:84% Fisher already noted there's this very precipitous fall 00:35:00.780 --> 00:35:03.630 align:middle line:90% around 1970, '71 after it peaks. 00:35:03.630 --> 00:35:06.390 align:middle line:84% Let's look first, though, at this unbelievable rise. 00:35:06.390 --> 00:35:08.700 align:middle line:84% And I showed you earlier this is rising faster 00:35:08.700 --> 00:35:12.060 align:middle line:84% than any other field in terms of rates of growth 00:35:12.060 --> 00:35:14.420 align:middle line:90% across the American academy. 00:35:14.420 --> 00:35:16.140 align:middle line:84% The feature that this curve looks 00:35:16.140 --> 00:35:18.450 align:middle line:84% most like, at least to my eye, is actually 00:35:18.450 --> 00:35:20.490 align:middle line:84% something economists call a speculative bubble. 00:35:20.490 --> 00:35:22.500 align:middle line:84% It looks like a stock market crash. 00:35:22.500 --> 00:35:25.890 align:middle line:84% This exponential rise that is clearly not sustainable 00:35:25.890 --> 00:35:28.080 align:middle line:84% followed by an exponential crash. 00:35:28.080 --> 00:35:31.260 align:middle line:84% We see this happen on admittedly shorter time scales 00:35:31.260 --> 00:35:33.510 align:middle line:84% but with the same kind of characteristic curve 00:35:33.510 --> 00:35:34.780 align:middle line:90% all the time. 00:35:34.780 --> 00:35:36.270 align:middle line:84% So that got me thinking about what 00:35:36.270 --> 00:35:39.510 align:middle line:84% do economists or economic historians or sociologists, 00:35:39.510 --> 00:35:42.450 align:middle line:84% how have they described these financial or speculative 00:35:42.450 --> 00:35:42.953 align:middle line:90% bubbles? 00:35:42.953 --> 00:35:44.370 align:middle line:84% And is there anything we can learn 00:35:44.370 --> 00:35:47.790 align:middle line:84% from their treatment of these kind of characteristic patterns 00:35:47.790 --> 00:35:50.890 align:middle line:84% of prices of commodities that might help us make sense 00:35:50.890 --> 00:35:54.310 align:middle line:84% of this very unusual, very stark pattern in the training 00:35:54.310 --> 00:35:56.330 align:middle line:84% of young physicists in this country? 00:35:56.330 --> 00:35:58.210 align:middle line:90% So there are some lovely books. 00:35:58.210 --> 00:36:00.730 align:middle line:84% There's a book that I quite enjoyed by Robert Shiller, 00:36:00.730 --> 00:36:01.960 align:middle line:90% who's an economist at Yale. 00:36:01.960 --> 00:36:04.330 align:middle line:84% Actually received the Nobel Prize in economics 00:36:04.330 --> 00:36:05.553 align:middle line:90% a number of years ago. 00:36:05.553 --> 00:36:07.720 align:middle line:84% There's also a very cool book by my colleague Donald 00:36:07.720 --> 00:36:11.470 align:middle line:84% McKenzie, who's a sociologist of science and technology. 00:36:11.470 --> 00:36:13.840 align:middle line:84% Many others we could point to beyond these that 00:36:13.840 --> 00:36:16.750 align:middle line:84% look at these kind of characteristic financial or 00:36:16.750 --> 00:36:18.398 align:middle line:90% speculative anomalies. 00:36:18.398 --> 00:36:20.440 align:middle line:84% Although unfortunately, they're not so anomalous. 00:36:20.440 --> 00:36:21.940 align:middle line:90% They happen kind of often. 00:36:21.940 --> 00:36:24.460 align:middle line:84% Where the price of some object gets 00:36:24.460 --> 00:36:26.380 align:middle line:84% bid up kind of all out of proportion 00:36:26.380 --> 00:36:29.710 align:middle line:84% to any kind of valuations that otherwise might have made sense 00:36:29.710 --> 00:36:32.980 align:middle line:84% until the price becomes simply unsustainable 00:36:32.980 --> 00:36:34.060 align:middle line:90% and followed by a crash. 00:36:34.060 --> 00:36:37.720 align:middle line:84% Not just a market readjustment, but a catastrophic fall. 00:36:37.720 --> 00:36:39.940 align:middle line:84% And these have been identified at least as early 00:36:39.940 --> 00:36:41.860 align:middle line:90% as the 17th century. 00:36:41.860 --> 00:36:43.810 align:middle line:84% The South Sea bubble, about which 00:36:43.810 --> 00:36:46.270 align:middle line:84% my friend, two of my colleagues are writing actually. 00:36:46.270 --> 00:36:48.970 align:middle line:84% Both Will Derringer in our SGS program 00:36:48.970 --> 00:36:52.097 align:middle line:84% and also Tom Levinson in our comparative media studies 00:36:52.097 --> 00:36:54.430 align:middle line:84% and writing programs are each writing really fascinating 00:36:54.430 --> 00:36:55.330 align:middle line:90% books about this. 00:36:55.330 --> 00:36:58.030 align:middle line:84% This one nearly bankrupted Isaac Newton. 00:36:58.030 --> 00:37:01.280 align:middle line:84% More recent examples, not just in the US, but around 00:37:01.280 --> 00:37:01.780 align:middle line:90% the world. 00:37:01.780 --> 00:37:05.260 align:middle line:84% We see this happen sometimes with great frequency. 00:37:05.260 --> 00:37:07.420 align:middle line:84% What Shiller has written about, is there 00:37:07.420 --> 00:37:09.370 align:middle line:84% a way to make sense of this recurring 00:37:09.370 --> 00:37:12.070 align:middle line:84% pattern of this exponential rise followed 00:37:12.070 --> 00:37:13.750 align:middle line:84% by an exponential fall as opposed 00:37:13.750 --> 00:37:17.470 align:middle line:84% to anything else that might be kind of tiptoeing around 00:37:17.470 --> 00:37:19.180 align:middle line:84% some supposed market equilibrium? 00:37:19.180 --> 00:37:21.670 align:middle line:84% This is clearly non-equilibrium behavior here. 00:37:21.670 --> 00:37:24.670 align:middle line:84% And Shiller identifies three stages that he thinks 00:37:24.670 --> 00:37:27.940 align:middle line:84% are consistent across each of these examples and others. 00:37:27.940 --> 00:37:30.790 align:middle line:84% A role of hype, of amplification, and then 00:37:30.790 --> 00:37:31.360 align:middle line:90% feedback. 00:37:31.360 --> 00:37:32.693 align:middle line:90% And I found that really helpful. 00:37:32.693 --> 00:37:36.040 align:middle line:84% I think that helps us make sense also of that plot of PhDs 00:37:36.040 --> 00:37:37.580 align:middle line:90% in physics as well. 00:37:37.580 --> 00:37:41.350 align:middle line:84% So let's talk first about what gets this first phase of hype. 00:37:41.350 --> 00:37:43.360 align:middle line:84% During the early years of the Cold War, 00:37:43.360 --> 00:37:45.310 align:middle line:84% soon after the end of the Second World War, 00:37:45.310 --> 00:37:48.430 align:middle line:84% there were a series of efforts to assess just how 00:37:48.430 --> 00:37:51.380 align:middle line:84% many physicists and engineers were being trained 00:37:51.380 --> 00:37:54.080 align:middle line:84% each year in the Soviet Union after the Soviet Union had 00:37:54.080 --> 00:37:58.040 align:middle line:84% emerged as the number one rival to the United States, 00:37:58.040 --> 00:38:01.400 align:middle line:84% at least as seen by many political and military leaders 00:38:01.400 --> 00:38:02.270 align:middle line:90% in the US. 00:38:02.270 --> 00:38:05.660 align:middle line:84% So there were these three kind of classic studies undertaken 00:38:05.660 --> 00:38:06.497 align:middle line:90% in rapid order. 00:38:06.497 --> 00:38:07.580 align:middle line:90% You can see they're years. 00:38:07.580 --> 00:38:09.410 align:middle line:90% Not much time between them. 00:38:09.410 --> 00:38:13.250 align:middle line:84% Written by the lead authors were Nicholas DeWitt and then 00:38:13.250 --> 00:38:14.638 align:middle line:90% separately Alexander Korol. 00:38:14.638 --> 00:38:16.680 align:middle line:84% DeWitt and Korol actually shared a lot in common. 00:38:16.680 --> 00:38:19.070 align:middle line:84% They were both Soviet ex-pats themselves. 00:38:19.070 --> 00:38:21.020 align:middle line:84% They'd both been trained in engineering 00:38:21.020 --> 00:38:23.000 align:middle line:84% in the early years of the Soviet Union 00:38:23.000 --> 00:38:25.070 align:middle line:84% before they left and moved to the United States. 00:38:25.070 --> 00:38:27.240 align:middle line:84% They both settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 00:38:27.240 --> 00:38:30.800 align:middle line:84% So DeWitt was hired at the brand new Russian Research Center 00:38:30.800 --> 00:38:34.340 align:middle line:84% at Harvard, founded in around 1948 or so. 00:38:34.340 --> 00:38:36.860 align:middle line:84% Meanwhile, Alexander Korol was hired at MIT 00:38:36.860 --> 00:38:39.387 align:middle line:84% in the Center for International Studies, 00:38:39.387 --> 00:38:41.720 align:middle line:84% just set up after the war, part of the political science 00:38:41.720 --> 00:38:42.220 align:middle line:90% department. 00:38:42.220 --> 00:38:43.880 align:middle line:84% We now know both of these efforts 00:38:43.880 --> 00:38:47.240 align:middle line:84% were secretly bankrolled in part by the CIA. 00:38:47.240 --> 00:38:48.770 align:middle line:84% Although the documents they produced 00:38:48.770 --> 00:38:50.930 align:middle line:84% were fully open, not classified and so on. 00:38:50.930 --> 00:38:52.460 align:middle line:90% They were widely covered. 00:38:52.460 --> 00:38:55.220 align:middle line:84% And in fact, these reports were covered in the news. 00:38:55.220 --> 00:39:00.087 align:middle line:84% They were reviewed in widespread magazines and newspapers. 00:39:00.087 --> 00:39:01.670 align:middle line:84% What they both wanted to do was figure 00:39:01.670 --> 00:39:04.250 align:middle line:84% out how many scientists and engineers mostly 00:39:04.250 --> 00:39:06.210 align:middle line:84% in the physical sciences were being trained 00:39:06.210 --> 00:39:07.460 align:middle line:90% each year in the Soviet Union. 00:39:07.460 --> 00:39:09.980 align:middle line:84% And then you could ask is there a kind of concern 00:39:09.980 --> 00:39:13.910 align:middle line:84% about a gap, a kind of scientific preparedness 00:39:13.910 --> 00:39:17.280 align:middle line:84% gap between these now two rival countries. 00:39:17.280 --> 00:39:20.360 align:middle line:84% So both DeWitt and Korol, who had direct experience 00:39:20.360 --> 00:39:22.940 align:middle line:84% of the early years of the Soviet training system, 00:39:22.940 --> 00:39:24.710 align:middle line:90% had a lot of caveats. 00:39:24.710 --> 00:39:28.020 align:middle line:84% They were very explicit if you read these thick books that 00:39:28.020 --> 00:39:30.110 align:middle line:84% let's not get lost in what I think it was 00:39:30.110 --> 00:39:31.970 align:middle line:90% Korol called the numbers game. 00:39:31.970 --> 00:39:34.130 align:middle line:84% Let's not just look at tabulations of enrollments 00:39:34.130 --> 00:39:35.432 align:middle line:90% or degrees conferred each year. 00:39:35.432 --> 00:39:37.640 align:middle line:84% Because the systems were very different, they argued. 00:39:37.640 --> 00:39:39.057 align:middle line:84% The educational systems themselves 00:39:39.057 --> 00:39:42.090 align:middle line:84% were actually kind of a bit like apples and oranges. 00:39:42.090 --> 00:39:44.450 align:middle line:84% So just comparing numbers might be misleading 00:39:44.450 --> 00:39:45.740 align:middle line:90% was at least their conclusion. 00:39:45.740 --> 00:39:47.780 align:middle line:84% So for example, they both emphasize 00:39:47.780 --> 00:39:51.040 align:middle line:84% there were a large fraction of Soviet engineers 00:39:51.040 --> 00:39:53.890 align:middle line:84% who stayed in the Soviet Union who worked in administration 00:39:53.890 --> 00:39:56.330 align:middle line:84% or bureaucracy, not actively in research and development. 00:39:56.330 --> 00:39:58.300 align:middle line:84% So just because someone got a degree in metallurgy, 00:39:58.300 --> 00:40:00.310 align:middle line:84% if they're not actually an applied metallurgist, 00:40:00.310 --> 00:40:02.018 align:middle line:84% does that change the kind of preparedness 00:40:02.018 --> 00:40:03.700 align:middle line:90% for either country? 00:40:03.700 --> 00:40:05.770 align:middle line:84% They both identified what they considered 00:40:05.770 --> 00:40:09.100 align:middle line:84% an extreme specialization in the courses of study. 00:40:09.100 --> 00:40:11.260 align:middle line:84% And I'll say more about that in a moment. 00:40:11.260 --> 00:40:15.310 align:middle line:84% They each also independently suggested, 00:40:15.310 --> 00:40:16.960 align:middle line:84% the evidence here is a bit more spotty, 00:40:16.960 --> 00:40:18.910 align:middle line:84% but they put forward in their reports 00:40:18.910 --> 00:40:22.900 align:middle line:84% that when the targets for the numbers of degrees in a given 00:40:22.900 --> 00:40:26.260 align:middle line:84% field per five year period look like they might be falling 00:40:26.260 --> 00:40:29.080 align:middle line:84% below the quotas, below the expected production 00:40:29.080 --> 00:40:32.110 align:middle line:84% quotas in the Soviet Union, that standards would be lowered. 00:40:32.110 --> 00:40:34.152 align:middle line:84% So you could force more kind of mediocre students 00:40:34.152 --> 00:40:35.818 align:middle line:84% through, which of course, we would never 00:40:35.818 --> 00:40:37.030 align:middle line:90% do at MIT, of course. 00:40:37.030 --> 00:40:40.120 align:middle line:84% But the allegation was made in each of these studies 00:40:40.120 --> 00:40:43.175 align:middle line:84% that the quality of instruction is quite uneven 00:40:43.175 --> 00:40:44.800 align:middle line:84% because the Soviets were more concerned 00:40:44.800 --> 00:40:47.140 align:middle line:84% about these famous five year plans, 00:40:47.140 --> 00:40:50.190 align:middle line:84% how many tons of pig iron produced per five years, how 00:40:50.190 --> 00:40:54.130 align:middle line:84% many undergraduates majoring in physics or mathematics per five 00:40:54.130 --> 00:40:54.630 align:middle line:90% years. 00:40:54.630 --> 00:40:56.838 align:middle line:84% And likewise, something became increasingly important 00:40:56.838 --> 00:40:58.500 align:middle line:90% in these later reports. 00:40:58.500 --> 00:41:00.660 align:middle line:84% The number of students in the Soviet system who 00:41:00.660 --> 00:41:02.640 align:middle line:84% were full time students was actually 00:41:02.640 --> 00:41:04.288 align:middle line:90% the proportion was falling. 00:41:04.288 --> 00:41:06.330 align:middle line:84% And that in fact, the number of students enrolled 00:41:06.330 --> 00:41:10.590 align:middle line:84% included as many as 1/3 in the early years greater than 1/2 00:41:10.590 --> 00:41:15.000 align:middle line:84% by 1960 of part time students who held full time production 00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:17.700 align:middle line:84% jobs in a factory or some office and were 00:41:17.700 --> 00:41:19.980 align:middle line:84% doing basically correspondence courses to get 00:41:19.980 --> 00:41:22.320 align:middle line:90% their degrees at night. 00:41:22.320 --> 00:41:23.860 align:middle line:84% Which at least the authors argued 00:41:23.860 --> 00:41:25.652 align:middle line:84% would be quite a different kind of training 00:41:25.652 --> 00:41:28.620 align:middle line:84% than full time students in their chemistry labs day and night. 00:41:28.620 --> 00:41:31.020 align:middle line:84% In fact, many of these correspondence students 00:41:31.020 --> 00:41:34.920 align:middle line:84% had a ratio of 80 to 1, 80 students to 1 professor, 00:41:34.920 --> 00:41:38.470 align:middle line:84% including for seemingly hands on courses like organic chemistry. 00:41:38.470 --> 00:41:40.450 align:middle line:84% So not only were they never in a laboratory, 00:41:40.450 --> 00:41:44.280 align:middle line:84% but they had one overworked instructor grading 80 problem 00:41:44.280 --> 00:41:45.070 align:middle line:90% sets at a time. 00:41:45.070 --> 00:41:48.010 align:middle line:84% Which at least the assumption was this would maybe not 00:41:48.010 --> 00:41:50.457 align:middle line:90% be the best kind of education. 00:41:50.457 --> 00:41:52.540 align:middle line:84% For the specialization, they both point out things 00:41:52.540 --> 00:41:55.570 align:middle line:84% like at the undergraduate level at this time in the Soviet 00:41:55.570 --> 00:42:00.070 align:middle line:84% Union, a student would not major in the field of metallurgy. 00:42:00.070 --> 00:42:02.890 align:middle line:84% But actually in 1 of 11 subfields 00:42:02.890 --> 00:42:05.590 align:middle line:84% of the subfield of non-ferrous metals, metallurgy. 00:42:05.590 --> 00:42:08.050 align:middle line:84% So they argued there was this enormous specialization, 00:42:08.050 --> 00:42:10.330 align:middle line:84% nothing like a kind of GIRs or let alone 00:42:10.330 --> 00:42:12.220 align:middle line:84% a liberal arts model that was becoming 00:42:12.220 --> 00:42:13.512 align:middle line:90% so common in the United States. 00:42:13.512 --> 00:42:15.803 align:middle line:84% My colleague Lauren Graham has written a bit about this 00:42:15.803 --> 00:42:17.470 align:middle line:84% as well, more recently looking back, 00:42:17.470 --> 00:42:19.720 align:middle line:84% but even at the time both DeWitt and Korol emphasize 00:42:19.720 --> 00:42:21.070 align:middle line:90% these caveats. 00:42:21.070 --> 00:42:24.940 align:middle line:84% So with all those in mind, Korol, the MIT based author, 00:42:24.940 --> 00:42:28.250 align:middle line:84% refused to even tabulate enrollment data side by side. 00:42:28.250 --> 00:42:30.310 align:middle line:84% He puts numbers in his very lengthy report. 00:42:30.310 --> 00:42:32.980 align:middle line:84% It was published by the MIT Press, in fact. 00:42:32.980 --> 00:42:35.740 align:middle line:84% So his book is full of data, but he always put them on-- he 00:42:35.740 --> 00:42:37.450 align:middle line:84% never put them side by side because he 00:42:37.450 --> 00:42:40.750 align:middle line:84% wanted to avoid what he called unwarranted implications. 00:42:40.750 --> 00:42:43.660 align:middle line:84% Nicholas DeWitt did have tables kind of side by side, 00:42:43.660 --> 00:42:46.120 align:middle line:84% but he also always emphasized all these caveats 00:42:46.120 --> 00:42:48.010 align:middle line:84% about the kind of apples and oranges. 00:42:48.010 --> 00:42:51.853 align:middle line:84% What DeWitt found was consistent with Korol's numbers as well. 00:42:51.853 --> 00:42:53.770 align:middle line:84% I've now simplified it to make it just ratios. 00:42:53.770 --> 00:42:56.260 align:middle line:84% He actually has full kind of tabulations of enrollments 00:42:56.260 --> 00:42:57.700 align:middle line:90% and degrees conferred. 00:42:57.700 --> 00:43:01.210 align:middle line:84% If you compare the number of photon university students 00:43:01.210 --> 00:43:04.270 align:middle line:84% pursuing undergraduate degrees or more advanced degrees, 00:43:04.270 --> 00:43:05.950 align:middle line:84% in the US, the Soviet Union, there 00:43:05.950 --> 00:43:08.260 align:middle line:84% were actually three times more full time students 00:43:08.260 --> 00:43:10.420 align:middle line:84% in higher education in the US than the Soviet 00:43:10.420 --> 00:43:12.250 align:middle line:84% Union at the time he wrote these reports. 00:43:12.250 --> 00:43:15.250 align:middle line:84% If you add in all those extension and correspondence 00:43:15.250 --> 00:43:20.140 align:middle line:84% students, there were still more students 00:43:20.140 --> 00:43:22.120 align:middle line:84% in US higher education than the Soviet Union. 00:43:22.120 --> 00:43:24.880 align:middle line:84% Now the gap closes from 3 to 1 to 4 to 3. 00:43:24.880 --> 00:43:27.910 align:middle line:84% But there was this remarkable imbalance 00:43:27.910 --> 00:43:31.210 align:middle line:84% in the distribution of topics of the students were studying. 00:43:31.210 --> 00:43:33.640 align:middle line:84% And in the Soviet Union, it was nearly 3/4 00:43:33.640 --> 00:43:36.280 align:middle line:84% of the students who were studying something in science 00:43:36.280 --> 00:43:38.770 align:middle line:84% and engineering versus only 1/4 of the time 00:43:38.770 --> 00:43:39.800 align:middle line:90% in the American system. 00:43:39.800 --> 00:43:41.380 align:middle line:84% So when you combine these last two, 00:43:41.380 --> 00:43:45.190 align:middle line:84% include all those extension and correspondence school students, 00:43:45.190 --> 00:43:48.610 align:middle line:84% and look at this high imbalance in the distribution of topics, 00:43:48.610 --> 00:43:52.120 align:middle line:84% it looked like the Soviet Union was graduating 00:43:52.120 --> 00:43:55.630 align:middle line:84% two to three times more students per year in engineering 00:43:55.630 --> 00:43:57.700 align:middle line:84% and the applied sciences than the United States. 00:43:57.700 --> 00:44:00.580 align:middle line:84% So they were both saying, it's not the same education. 00:44:00.580 --> 00:44:02.770 align:middle line:84% The fields of study don't map onto it the same way. 00:44:02.770 --> 00:44:04.610 align:middle line:84% There's all these part time students. 00:44:04.610 --> 00:44:06.130 align:middle line:84% But if you ignore all those caveats 00:44:06.130 --> 00:44:08.260 align:middle line:84% and just run the numbers, it looks 00:44:08.260 --> 00:44:11.870 align:middle line:84% like you have this gap of two to three times per year. 00:44:11.870 --> 00:44:15.130 align:middle line:84% Now, that's where we find Robert Shiller the economist's example 00:44:15.130 --> 00:44:16.090 align:middle line:90% of hype. 00:44:16.090 --> 00:44:20.380 align:middle line:84% That ratio, two to three times, gets pulled entirely out 00:44:20.380 --> 00:44:23.830 align:middle line:84% of context and repeated literally ad nauseam 00:44:23.830 --> 00:44:25.840 align:middle line:84% in briefings by members of the CIA, 00:44:25.840 --> 00:44:27.700 align:middle line:84% in congressional testimony, both by 00:44:27.700 --> 00:44:31.450 align:middle line:84% and to members of the Pentagon in various congressional 00:44:31.450 --> 00:44:32.530 align:middle line:90% committees, the AEC. 00:44:32.530 --> 00:44:33.450 align:middle line:90% You see it everywhere. 00:44:33.450 --> 00:44:36.550 align:middle line:84% It's repeated in mainstream media up and down. 00:44:36.550 --> 00:44:37.570 align:middle line:90% It was just everywhere. 00:44:37.570 --> 00:44:40.600 align:middle line:84% And again, I've written about this in a separate essay. 00:44:40.600 --> 00:44:42.880 align:middle line:84% And that was a dominant story even 00:44:42.880 --> 00:44:45.440 align:middle line:84% before the launch of the Soviet satellite 00:44:45.440 --> 00:44:47.770 align:middle line:90% Sputnik in early October of '57. 00:44:47.770 --> 00:44:49.810 align:middle line:84% So this notion of two to three times 00:44:49.810 --> 00:44:52.270 align:middle line:84% was put forward even with the first of DeWitt's studies 00:44:52.270 --> 00:44:53.920 align:middle line:90% in 1955. 00:44:53.920 --> 00:44:57.730 align:middle line:84% And that just gets even more hyped up much more dramatically 00:44:57.730 --> 00:44:59.080 align:middle line:90% after Sputnik. 00:44:59.080 --> 00:45:03.460 align:middle line:84% So let's look at that second step in Shiller's model. 00:45:03.460 --> 00:45:05.277 align:middle line:84% You go from hype to amplification. 00:45:05.277 --> 00:45:07.360 align:middle line:84% Again, I found these examples in various archives. 00:45:07.360 --> 00:45:09.460 align:middle line:84% And I found them just fascinating. 00:45:09.460 --> 00:45:13.630 align:middle line:84% Looking at physicists trying to respond to them the surprise 00:45:13.630 --> 00:45:15.070 align:middle line:90% launch of Sputnik. 00:45:15.070 --> 00:45:17.080 align:middle line:84% So now this is people mobilizing literally 00:45:17.080 --> 00:45:19.660 align:middle line:84% in the closing weeks of 1957, just 00:45:19.660 --> 00:45:22.480 align:middle line:84% days and weeks after the launch of the Soviet satellite. 00:45:22.480 --> 00:45:24.520 align:middle line:84% We now know there was at the time 00:45:24.520 --> 00:45:28.840 align:middle line:84% a private briefing in the Oval Office for President Dwight 00:45:28.840 --> 00:45:33.790 align:middle line:84% Eisenhower by his brand new still rather informal group 00:45:33.790 --> 00:45:36.370 align:middle line:84% that came to be called the Presidential Science Advisory 00:45:36.370 --> 00:45:37.720 align:middle line:90% Committee or PSAC. 00:45:37.720 --> 00:45:40.840 align:middle line:84% It was actually formalized by President Eisenhower 00:45:40.840 --> 00:45:43.090 align:middle line:84% soon after the launch of Sputnik. 00:45:43.090 --> 00:45:47.820 align:middle line:84% And one of the leads of that was Nobel Laureate Isidor Rabi. 00:45:47.820 --> 00:45:49.290 align:middle line:90% Rabi actually knew Eisenhower. 00:45:49.290 --> 00:45:52.410 align:middle line:84% Eisenhower, as you may know, before becoming President 00:45:52.410 --> 00:45:54.150 align:middle line:84% of the United States was actually 00:45:54.150 --> 00:45:56.550 align:middle line:84% president of Columbia University and that 00:45:56.550 --> 00:45:58.650 align:middle line:84% was where Rabi was a member of the faculty 00:45:58.650 --> 00:46:00.010 align:middle line:90% for many, many, many years. 00:46:00.010 --> 00:46:02.482 align:middle line:84% So Rabi knew Eisenhower personally. 00:46:02.482 --> 00:46:04.440 align:middle line:84% And we now know from notes of this meeting that 00:46:04.440 --> 00:46:08.430 align:middle line:84% were much later released, Rabi was pushing Eisenhower to use 00:46:08.430 --> 00:46:11.490 align:middle line:84% Sputnik as a pretext, as an excuse to close 00:46:11.490 --> 00:46:14.250 align:middle line:84% what they already began calling the manpower gap. 00:46:14.250 --> 00:46:16.290 align:middle line:84% The notes make clear that Rabi didn't think, 00:46:16.290 --> 00:46:18.030 align:middle line:84% or some of Rabi's colleagues, didn't 00:46:18.030 --> 00:46:20.010 align:middle line:84% think there was actually a gap to worry 00:46:20.010 --> 00:46:21.630 align:middle line:84% about in the numbers of scientists 00:46:21.630 --> 00:46:22.680 align:middle line:90% and engineers trained. 00:46:22.680 --> 00:46:25.590 align:middle line:84% But that nonetheless, you could use this politically as cover 00:46:25.590 --> 00:46:27.690 align:middle line:84% to make a whole different kind of investment 00:46:27.690 --> 00:46:30.583 align:middle line:84% in making young physicists and engineers in the US. 00:46:30.583 --> 00:46:33.000 align:middle line:84% Likewise, right around the same time, another set of notes 00:46:33.000 --> 00:46:35.712 align:middle line:90% I found in the archives. 00:46:35.712 --> 00:46:37.170 align:middle line:84% Elmer Hutchinson, who by this point 00:46:37.170 --> 00:46:39.545 align:middle line:84% had become director of the American Institute of Physics, 00:46:39.545 --> 00:46:40.890 align:middle line:90% was chairing many committees. 00:46:40.890 --> 00:46:43.410 align:middle line:84% Kind of outreach and public policy and lobbying committees. 00:46:43.410 --> 00:46:47.040 align:middle line:84% And he writes in memos to his committee mates 00:46:47.040 --> 00:46:48.730 align:middle line:84% that the launch of Sputnik presents 00:46:48.730 --> 00:46:51.760 align:middle line:84% the physicists an almost unprecedented opportunity 00:46:51.760 --> 00:46:55.152 align:middle line:84% to influence public opinion greatly with the same argument 00:46:55.152 --> 00:46:57.610 align:middle line:84% as Rabi was making, that we should be investing in training 00:46:57.610 --> 00:46:59.560 align:middle line:90% many, many more physicists now. 00:46:59.560 --> 00:47:01.120 align:middle line:84% Here's actually my favorite example 00:47:01.120 --> 00:47:03.580 align:middle line:84% I found in Hans Bethe's papers at Cornell. 00:47:03.580 --> 00:47:06.250 align:middle line:84% Bethe would go on to win the Nobel Prize. 00:47:06.250 --> 00:47:08.980 align:middle line:84% He was already a very prominent physicist in the United States 00:47:08.980 --> 00:47:09.520 align:middle line:90% context. 00:47:09.520 --> 00:47:12.760 align:middle line:84% He was an emigre originally from Germany in the '30s. 00:47:12.760 --> 00:47:16.960 align:middle line:84% But by the '50s, was an outspoken leading member 00:47:16.960 --> 00:47:18.085 align:middle line:90% of the community in the US. 00:47:18.085 --> 00:47:20.627 align:middle line:84% He was already by this point a past president of the American 00:47:20.627 --> 00:47:21.400 align:middle line:90% Physics Society. 00:47:21.400 --> 00:47:23.560 align:middle line:84% So he gave a series of radio addresses 00:47:23.560 --> 00:47:27.070 align:middle line:84% to reflect on what the launch of Sputnik might mean. 00:47:27.070 --> 00:47:29.260 align:middle line:84% And I found the typescript from which he would read. 00:47:29.260 --> 00:47:32.320 align:middle line:84% And in pencil in his handwriting in the margins 00:47:32.320 --> 00:47:33.872 align:middle line:84% are all these questions about where 00:47:33.872 --> 00:47:35.830 align:middle line:84% this ratio of two to three times had come from. 00:47:35.830 --> 00:47:37.038 align:middle line:90% He said, what is it based on? 00:47:37.038 --> 00:47:37.900 align:middle line:90% How is it computed? 00:47:37.900 --> 00:47:39.410 align:middle line:84% But he never took it out of his address. 00:47:39.410 --> 00:47:40.300 align:middle line:84% He was like, I should look that up, 00:47:40.300 --> 00:47:41.650 align:middle line:90% and it appears he never did. 00:47:41.650 --> 00:47:44.560 align:middle line:84% So that kind of amplifying of the initial hype 00:47:44.560 --> 00:47:46.180 align:middle line:84% of two to three times is getting-- 00:47:46.180 --> 00:47:49.020 align:middle line:84% we see it unfolding in very concrete places 00:47:49.020 --> 00:47:51.930 align:middle line:84% and then, again, picked up broadly by journalists 00:47:51.930 --> 00:47:53.127 align:middle line:90% and policymakers. 00:47:53.127 --> 00:47:55.710 align:middle line:84% My colleague John Rudolph writes nicely about this in his book 00:47:55.710 --> 00:47:58.720 align:middle line:84% and I write about it in my own recent book as well. 00:47:58.720 --> 00:48:01.380 align:middle line:84% Now we come to the last step in that kind of three stage 00:48:01.380 --> 00:48:04.620 align:middle line:84% model from the economist Robert Shiller's I think 00:48:04.620 --> 00:48:05.520 align:middle line:90% really lovely book. 00:48:05.520 --> 00:48:08.080 align:middle line:90% 00:48:08.080 --> 00:48:10.340 align:middle line:90% And that's feedback. 00:48:10.340 --> 00:48:12.770 align:middle line:84% So again, it's actually kind of hard to believe, 00:48:12.770 --> 00:48:16.540 align:middle line:84% given our recent experience of US Congress these days 00:48:16.540 --> 00:48:19.180 align:middle line:84% and how slow it is to get anything to move, 00:48:19.180 --> 00:48:23.500 align:middle line:84% US Congress moved unbelievably quickly in response to Sputnik 00:48:23.500 --> 00:48:26.470 align:middle line:84% and passed major, we might rightly say, 00:48:26.470 --> 00:48:29.680 align:middle line:84% landmark legislation less than one year 00:48:29.680 --> 00:48:31.180 align:middle line:90% after the launch of Sputnik. 00:48:31.180 --> 00:48:34.600 align:middle line:84% It became known as the National Defense Education Act 00:48:34.600 --> 00:48:36.700 align:middle line:90% or often just called the NDEA. 00:48:36.700 --> 00:48:39.550 align:middle line:84% It was signed into law by President Eisenhower 00:48:39.550 --> 00:48:41.470 align:middle line:90% in September of 1958. 00:48:41.470 --> 00:48:44.962 align:middle line:84% It made available $1 billion from the federal government. 00:48:44.962 --> 00:48:46.420 align:middle line:84% If you adjust for inflation, that's 00:48:46.420 --> 00:48:50.560 align:middle line:84% around $9 billion today over a short few years window. 00:48:50.560 --> 00:48:54.400 align:middle line:84% Concentrated kind of infusion of a lot of cash. 00:48:54.400 --> 00:48:56.920 align:middle line:84% And part of what's so interesting to me about this 00:48:56.920 --> 00:49:00.850 align:middle line:84% historically is that that was literally the first federal aid 00:49:00.850 --> 00:49:02.590 align:middle line:84% to higher education in the United 00:49:02.590 --> 00:49:04.840 align:middle line:90% States in about 100 years. 00:49:04.840 --> 00:49:06.970 align:middle line:84% There had become a long standing tradition 00:49:06.970 --> 00:49:11.420 align:middle line:84% between the 1860s with the Morrill Land Grant Act, 00:49:11.420 --> 00:49:13.370 align:middle line:84% which actually helped found MIT and many 00:49:13.370 --> 00:49:15.830 align:middle line:84% of the public universities throughout the United States 00:49:15.830 --> 00:49:19.370 align:middle line:84% around the time of the Civil War, between the 1860s 00:49:19.370 --> 00:49:22.280 align:middle line:84% and this post-Sputnik bill of the NDEA. 00:49:22.280 --> 00:49:24.860 align:middle line:84% The tradition had kind of coalesced 00:49:24.860 --> 00:49:28.790 align:middle line:84% that education, including higher education, was a local affair. 00:49:28.790 --> 00:49:31.310 align:middle line:84% It was for local communities and states 00:49:31.310 --> 00:49:33.260 align:middle line:84% to handle, not the federal government. 00:49:33.260 --> 00:49:36.052 align:middle line:84% This was often seen as a so called third rail. 00:49:36.052 --> 00:49:38.510 align:middle line:84% The federal government had no business in higher education. 00:49:38.510 --> 00:49:40.670 align:middle line:90% And that was just shattered. 00:49:40.670 --> 00:49:45.710 align:middle line:84% That tradition was overridden very rapidly in response 00:49:45.710 --> 00:49:49.010 align:middle line:84% to the launch of Sputnik with this billion dollar investment 00:49:49.010 --> 00:49:50.390 align:middle line:90% in higher education. 00:49:50.390 --> 00:49:54.240 align:middle line:84% That had some predictable and very rapid effects. 00:49:54.240 --> 00:49:57.440 align:middle line:84% So in the first four years after the bill was enacted, 00:49:57.440 --> 00:50:00.230 align:middle line:84% it basically doubled the number of graduate fellowships, 00:50:00.230 --> 00:50:02.870 align:middle line:84% fully funded graduate fellowships for the sciences 00:50:02.870 --> 00:50:03.980 align:middle line:90% in the United States. 00:50:03.980 --> 00:50:06.290 align:middle line:84% So 7,000 isn't very many until you compare it 00:50:06.290 --> 00:50:08.420 align:middle line:84% to the number of federal fellowships 00:50:08.420 --> 00:50:10.400 align:middle line:84% before then, which had been practically none. 00:50:10.400 --> 00:50:14.900 align:middle line:84% It also subsidized the training of half a million 00:50:14.900 --> 00:50:16.700 align:middle line:84% undergraduates as long as they were 00:50:16.700 --> 00:50:20.720 align:middle line:84% studying the physical sciences, engineering, or mathematics. 00:50:20.720 --> 00:50:23.088 align:middle line:84% It also offered block grants to states 00:50:23.088 --> 00:50:24.380 align:middle line:90% and to individual institutions. 00:50:24.380 --> 00:50:26.547 align:middle line:84% The whole point was to get more and more students in 00:50:26.547 --> 00:50:29.090 align:middle line:84% to address the so called manpower gap of so 00:50:29.090 --> 00:50:30.530 align:middle line:90% called scientific manpower. 00:50:30.530 --> 00:50:34.790 align:middle line:84% Since that time, several political and legislative 00:50:34.790 --> 00:50:37.760 align:middle line:84% historians have gone back to the passage of this landmark bill, 00:50:37.760 --> 00:50:39.560 align:middle line:84% the National Defense Education Act, 00:50:39.560 --> 00:50:43.100 align:middle line:84% and they've really picked apart the kind of backroom lobbying 00:50:43.100 --> 00:50:45.440 align:middle line:84% and the sometimes, let's say, shadings 00:50:45.440 --> 00:50:48.860 align:middle line:84% of the truth that were done by proponents to kind of ram 00:50:48.860 --> 00:50:50.750 align:middle line:90% this thing through so quickly. 00:50:50.750 --> 00:50:53.210 align:middle line:84% And as the historian Barbara Clouse 00:50:53.210 --> 00:50:56.510 align:middle line:84% has concluded from a really just fascinating kind 00:50:56.510 --> 00:50:59.540 align:middle line:84% of moment-by-moment legislative history of this bill, 00:50:59.540 --> 00:51:01.760 align:middle line:84% in her own conclusions I'm quoting here, 00:51:01.760 --> 00:51:04.640 align:middle line:84% that the "proponents were willing to strain the evidence 00:51:04.640 --> 00:51:06.410 align:middle line:84% to establish a new policy," that it 00:51:06.410 --> 00:51:08.420 align:middle line:84% was made to seem that the manpower 00:51:08.420 --> 00:51:10.730 align:middle line:84% gap was more important and more dire 00:51:10.730 --> 00:51:12.050 align:middle line:90% than indeed it seemed to be. 00:51:12.050 --> 00:51:16.190 align:middle line:84% And again, what explains these plots here 00:51:16.190 --> 00:51:18.230 align:middle line:84% is that all the aid from the NDEA 00:51:18.230 --> 00:51:20.390 align:middle line:84% was earmarked for so called defense 00:51:20.390 --> 00:51:23.150 align:middle line:84% fields in the language of the time, fields 00:51:23.150 --> 00:51:25.790 align:middle line:84% that were seen to be relevant for the National Defense. 00:51:25.790 --> 00:51:28.145 align:middle line:84% Science, math, engineering and area studies. 00:51:28.145 --> 00:51:30.020 align:middle line:84% Some parts of humanities and social sciences, 00:51:30.020 --> 00:51:32.645 align:middle line:84% like we need more people who are experts in the Soviet language 00:51:32.645 --> 00:51:34.700 align:middle line:84% or know about the culture of Ukrainians. 00:51:34.700 --> 00:51:36.540 align:middle line:84% So that would get some support as well. 00:51:36.540 --> 00:51:38.540 align:middle line:84% Now here's, again, something I've written about. 00:51:38.540 --> 00:51:39.832 align:middle line:90% I'd be glad to share the piece. 00:51:39.832 --> 00:51:42.590 align:middle line:84% If you go back to those reports from DeWitt and Korol, 00:51:42.590 --> 00:51:46.040 align:middle line:84% remember, these CIA funded, thoroughly unclassified, 00:51:46.040 --> 00:51:49.220 align:middle line:84% easy to find books still in our libraries today. 00:51:49.220 --> 00:51:52.167 align:middle line:84% If you go back and look at even just their data, let alone all 00:51:52.167 --> 00:51:53.750 align:middle line:84% their caveats about the different kind 00:51:53.750 --> 00:51:58.370 align:middle line:84% of educational institutions in the two countries, 00:51:58.370 --> 00:52:01.880 align:middle line:84% the numbers themselves really deserved a closer look. 00:52:01.880 --> 00:52:07.880 align:middle line:84% The columns in DeWitt's very densely formatted data 00:52:07.880 --> 00:52:10.730 align:middle line:84% that are in his book that were put together 00:52:10.730 --> 00:52:13.490 align:middle line:84% to form this ratio of so called two to three times 00:52:13.490 --> 00:52:15.740 align:middle line:84% were labeled in the press engineering 00:52:15.740 --> 00:52:16.850 align:middle line:90% and applied sciences. 00:52:16.850 --> 00:52:19.460 align:middle line:84% It actually meant engineering, agriculture, and health. 00:52:19.460 --> 00:52:22.830 align:middle line:84% And it explicitly did not include the natural sciences. 00:52:22.830 --> 00:52:27.770 align:middle line:84% It left out physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biology. 00:52:27.770 --> 00:52:29.630 align:middle line:84% And so what it was actually counting 00:52:29.630 --> 00:52:32.990 align:middle line:84% was a lot of experts in agriculture and agronomics, 00:52:32.990 --> 00:52:34.880 align:middle line:84% as it was called at the time, including 00:52:34.880 --> 00:52:38.720 align:middle line:84% this what I think most would conclude devastating tradition 00:52:38.720 --> 00:52:41.240 align:middle line:84% in the Soviet Union of so called lysenkoism, 00:52:41.240 --> 00:52:44.900 align:middle line:84% kind of an idiosyncratic non-genetics notion about how 00:52:44.900 --> 00:52:47.900 align:middle line:84% plants change, which is at least blamed by some historians 00:52:47.900 --> 00:52:51.710 align:middle line:84% as having led to just failures of many collective farms 00:52:51.710 --> 00:52:52.920 align:middle line:90% and widespread starvation. 00:52:52.920 --> 00:52:55.010 align:middle line:84% So yes, there were many people graduating 00:52:55.010 --> 00:52:59.378 align:middle line:84% with degrees in agriculture but not in physics or math. 00:52:59.378 --> 00:53:01.170 align:middle line:84% Likewise, it Included health professionals, 00:53:01.170 --> 00:53:03.950 align:middle line:84% including nurses and dentists and so on, which is clearly 00:53:03.950 --> 00:53:08.060 align:middle line:84% an important measure of overall society labor force 00:53:08.060 --> 00:53:12.440 align:middle line:84% but was not the kinds of defense oriented experts 00:53:12.440 --> 00:53:14.870 align:middle line:84% that it was characterized to have been. 00:53:14.870 --> 00:53:18.950 align:middle line:84% If you go back to the thoroughly accessible non-classified data 00:53:18.950 --> 00:53:22.370 align:middle line:84% in these books and you drop agriculture and health, 00:53:22.370 --> 00:53:25.190 align:middle line:84% keep engineering and add back in science natural sciences 00:53:25.190 --> 00:53:27.500 align:middle line:84% and mathematics, then actually the enrollment numbers 00:53:27.500 --> 00:53:28.880 align:middle line:90% come out to be basically a tie. 00:53:28.880 --> 00:53:31.250 align:middle line:84% The Soviet lead falls by a factor of 10. 00:53:31.250 --> 00:53:34.550 align:middle line:84% And that's still including all those extension school students 00:53:34.550 --> 00:53:36.180 align:middle line:84% and correspondence school students. 00:53:36.180 --> 00:53:40.538 align:middle line:84% So the so called manpower gap was really a kind of chimera. 00:53:40.538 --> 00:53:42.080 align:middle line:84% And that's still under the assumption 00:53:42.080 --> 00:53:44.265 align:middle line:84% that the nation's safety depended 00:53:44.265 --> 00:53:46.640 align:middle line:84% on having lots and lots of theoretical physicists around, 00:53:46.640 --> 00:53:48.593 align:middle line:84% which itself was an assumption that one might 00:53:48.593 --> 00:53:49.760 align:middle line:90% have questioned at the time. 00:53:49.760 --> 00:53:52.910 align:middle line:84% Just playing the numbers game was actually 00:53:52.910 --> 00:53:56.750 align:middle line:84% really kind of twisted or misread 00:53:56.750 --> 00:53:59.970 align:middle line:84% and used very strategically during the kind of fever years 00:53:59.970 --> 00:54:02.310 align:middle line:90% of the early Cold War. 00:54:02.310 --> 00:54:03.990 align:middle line:90% So we come back to this plot. 00:54:03.990 --> 00:54:05.640 align:middle line:84% Now anticipating Fisher's question 00:54:05.640 --> 00:54:08.253 align:middle line:84% from earlier, the same plot I showed before. 00:54:08.253 --> 00:54:09.670 align:middle line:84% We now have a better sense of what 00:54:09.670 --> 00:54:11.450 align:middle line:90% was driving this up so high. 00:54:11.450 --> 00:54:14.350 align:middle line:84% And it was kind of a series of political decisions 00:54:14.350 --> 00:54:17.592 align:middle line:84% and priorities often at the federal government level. 00:54:17.592 --> 00:54:19.300 align:middle line:84% We can question them, but we can at least 00:54:19.300 --> 00:54:22.060 align:middle line:84% understand why they were made when they were. 00:54:22.060 --> 00:54:25.480 align:middle line:84% What about this really quite precipitous fall? 00:54:25.480 --> 00:54:28.570 align:middle line:84% And that was very much as Fisher had anticipated, a lot of that 00:54:28.570 --> 00:54:32.230 align:middle line:84% had to do with other changes in the United States 00:54:32.230 --> 00:54:34.690 align:middle line:84% and around the world by the late '60s compared 00:54:34.690 --> 00:54:36.160 align:middle line:90% to the early '50s. 00:54:36.160 --> 00:54:39.280 align:middle line:84% A lot of that was the escalation of fighting in the Vietnam 00:54:39.280 --> 00:54:43.900 align:middle line:84% War, which included things like the removal of draft deferments 00:54:43.900 --> 00:54:45.130 align:middle line:90% for full time students. 00:54:45.130 --> 00:54:46.990 align:middle line:84% So full time students, both undergraduate 00:54:46.990 --> 00:54:49.390 align:middle line:84% and graduate students, got deferments 00:54:49.390 --> 00:54:52.060 align:middle line:84% from being drafted to go serve in Vietnam up 00:54:52.060 --> 00:54:53.170 align:middle line:90% until the late '60s. 00:54:53.170 --> 00:54:55.940 align:middle line:84% And then because the war wasn't going very well for the United 00:54:55.940 --> 00:54:58.780 align:middle line:84% States, there was a kind of recalculation 00:54:58.780 --> 00:55:01.870 align:middle line:84% on the number of people needed for the kind 00:55:01.870 --> 00:55:03.400 align:middle line:90% of military manpower. 00:55:03.400 --> 00:55:05.260 align:middle line:84% So people who had gotten deferments 00:55:05.260 --> 00:55:08.120 align:middle line:84% for being full time students were now no longer eligible 00:55:08.120 --> 00:55:11.280 align:middle line:84% for them starting in the late '60s. 00:55:11.280 --> 00:55:14.990 align:middle line:84% There was also a lot of concern on campus and actually even 00:55:14.990 --> 00:55:19.730 align:middle line:84% within the Pentagon about why the defense agencies were 00:55:19.730 --> 00:55:23.660 align:middle line:84% funding all of non-mission oriented, open ended, 00:55:23.660 --> 00:55:24.740 align:middle line:90% basic research. 00:55:24.740 --> 00:55:27.290 align:middle line:84% The argument came to be among the Department 00:55:27.290 --> 00:55:29.930 align:middle line:84% of Defense's own auditors, their own accountants. 00:55:29.930 --> 00:55:34.040 align:middle line:84% If we want to get better kind of military ready instrumentation 00:55:34.040 --> 00:55:36.770 align:middle line:84% or weapons or defense systems, shouldn't we 00:55:36.770 --> 00:55:39.830 align:middle line:84% invest in projects that will make better defense systems 00:55:39.830 --> 00:55:42.500 align:middle line:84% as opposed to spending money on seemingly open 00:55:42.500 --> 00:55:46.910 align:middle line:84% ended topics and basic physics that sometimes 00:55:46.910 --> 00:55:49.370 align:middle line:84% have a kind of trickle on effect and lead to new devices 00:55:49.370 --> 00:55:50.510 align:middle line:90% but often do not. 00:55:50.510 --> 00:55:53.600 align:middle line:84% So the Pentagon itself began this internal audit 00:55:53.600 --> 00:55:56.030 align:middle line:84% that they concluded in 1969 saying 00:55:56.030 --> 00:55:58.160 align:middle line:84% that it's been a terrible policy, terrible return 00:55:58.160 --> 00:56:01.220 align:middle line:84% on investment for the Pentagon itself 00:56:01.220 --> 00:56:04.250 align:middle line:84% to be paying all these students to pursue PhDs in physics 00:56:04.250 --> 00:56:07.140 align:middle line:84% if they're not doing defense related work. 00:56:07.140 --> 00:56:10.210 align:middle line:84% And at the same time, really because of the new kind 00:56:10.210 --> 00:56:12.590 align:middle line:84% of immediacy of the fighting in Vietnam, 00:56:12.590 --> 00:56:14.740 align:middle line:84% there were many, many critics of the Pentagon 00:56:14.740 --> 00:56:18.160 align:middle line:84% on college campuses, students, faculty, staff alike 00:56:18.160 --> 00:56:22.480 align:middle line:84% who were very upset at the domination of spending 00:56:22.480 --> 00:56:24.310 align:middle line:84% on university campuses by the Pentagon. 00:56:24.310 --> 00:56:26.080 align:middle line:84% So both from within the Defense Department 00:56:26.080 --> 00:56:29.860 align:middle line:84% and from without really heightened by the course 00:56:29.860 --> 00:56:30.910 align:middle line:90% of the Vietnam War. 00:56:30.910 --> 00:56:36.310 align:middle line:84% This whole kind of framework for funding research and research 00:56:36.310 --> 00:56:38.200 align:middle line:84% students in the science is especially 00:56:38.200 --> 00:56:41.620 align:middle line:84% in the physical sciences gets in for some really quite severe 00:56:41.620 --> 00:56:45.910 align:middle line:84% Reassessment All kind of cresting around the same time? 00:56:45.910 --> 00:56:48.940 align:middle line:84% A third factor that starts to impact things 00:56:48.940 --> 00:56:52.570 align:middle line:84% is huge federal deficits and cuts 00:56:52.570 --> 00:56:55.452 align:middle line:84% to both military and education spending at the federal level. 00:56:55.452 --> 00:56:57.910 align:middle line:84% So there's less money to go around and then fights over how 00:56:57.910 --> 00:56:59.080 align:middle line:90% to allocate that money. 00:56:59.080 --> 00:57:01.210 align:middle line:84% These photos are both taken, by the way, from MIT. 00:57:01.210 --> 00:57:02.835 align:middle line:84% You can see instrumentation laboratory. 00:57:02.835 --> 00:57:05.110 align:middle line:84% That's what's now Draper laboratory. 00:57:05.110 --> 00:57:08.500 align:middle line:84% There were these marches in November of 1969 00:57:08.500 --> 00:57:13.060 align:middle line:84% throughout the month of basically fights not just 00:57:13.060 --> 00:57:14.920 align:middle line:90% anti Vietnam War. 00:57:14.920 --> 00:57:18.460 align:middle line:84% But also anti-military spending on MIT's campus. 00:57:18.460 --> 00:57:19.630 align:middle line:90% And that led to fighting. 00:57:19.630 --> 00:57:21.748 align:middle line:90% You can see this was also-- 00:57:21.748 --> 00:57:23.290 align:middle line:84% I think this is right down the street 00:57:23.290 --> 00:57:25.660 align:middle line:84% from that where it led to clashes 00:57:25.660 --> 00:57:28.840 align:middle line:90% with the local Cambridge police. 00:57:28.840 --> 00:57:32.035 align:middle line:84% Really, I mean, students and staff being clubbed 00:57:32.035 --> 00:57:33.610 align:middle line:90% and some police injured as well. 00:57:33.610 --> 00:57:35.230 align:middle line:90% It was a melee. 00:57:35.230 --> 00:57:37.630 align:middle line:90% It was a fight in the streets. 00:57:37.630 --> 00:57:39.520 align:middle line:84% And that became emblematic of the kind 00:57:39.520 --> 00:57:42.130 align:middle line:84% of deep questioning of the arrangement that 00:57:42.130 --> 00:57:45.920 align:middle line:84% had led to this extraordinary 20 year rate of growth. 00:57:45.920 --> 00:57:48.820 align:middle line:84% And as you also see it in a very dramatic contraction 00:57:48.820 --> 00:57:50.120 align:middle line:90% in the field itself. 00:57:50.120 --> 00:57:53.980 align:middle line:84% So here's other information I found in the AIP archives. 00:57:53.980 --> 00:57:56.680 align:middle line:84% The AIP is to run a placement service 00:57:56.680 --> 00:57:59.830 align:middle line:84% to match up young PhDs finishing their degrees 00:57:59.830 --> 00:58:02.470 align:middle line:84% in the field with employers who are 00:58:02.470 --> 00:58:04.000 align:middle line:90% eager to hire young physicists. 00:58:04.000 --> 00:58:06.190 align:middle line:84% So we would help arrange interviews for jobs 00:58:06.190 --> 00:58:07.840 align:middle line:84% at the annual meetings, for example. 00:58:07.840 --> 00:58:10.370 align:middle line:84% And the AIP kept statistics on how many people, 00:58:10.370 --> 00:58:12.920 align:middle line:84% how many students registered with the service 00:58:12.920 --> 00:58:16.010 align:middle line:84% and how many employers were coming with jobs on offer. 00:58:16.010 --> 00:58:19.610 align:middle line:84% And you can see even after 15 years of exponential growth 00:58:19.610 --> 00:58:20.480 align:middle line:90% in the field. 00:58:20.480 --> 00:58:23.210 align:middle line:84% there was still more jobs on offer than students 00:58:23.210 --> 00:58:26.120 align:middle line:84% seeking jobs at, least through the AIP right 00:58:26.120 --> 00:58:27.630 align:middle line:90% into the early and mid 1960s. 00:58:27.630 --> 00:58:29.340 align:middle line:90% I find that mind boggling. 00:58:29.340 --> 00:58:30.930 align:middle line:84% But then you see the fortunes begin 00:58:30.930 --> 00:58:33.060 align:middle line:90% to reverse quite dramatically. 00:58:33.060 --> 00:58:34.640 align:middle line:90% So the bottom falls out. 00:58:34.640 --> 00:58:37.550 align:middle line:84% And then by 1971, there were more than 1,000 students 00:58:37.550 --> 00:58:40.470 align:middle line:84% registered with only 53 jobs on offer. 00:58:40.470 --> 00:58:43.250 align:middle line:84% And that wasn't just in universities. 00:58:43.250 --> 00:58:46.220 align:middle line:84% That was across government laboratories, private sector 00:58:46.220 --> 00:58:48.240 align:middle line:84% industrial laboratories, and universities. 00:58:48.240 --> 00:58:50.960 align:middle line:84% So you have this unbelievable collapse of the physics job 00:58:50.960 --> 00:58:53.840 align:middle line:84% market as a coalescence of these forces, 00:58:53.840 --> 00:58:57.080 align:middle line:84% political, economic, cultural, institutional. 00:58:57.080 --> 00:58:59.430 align:middle line:84% So that together helps account for. 00:58:59.430 --> 00:59:01.520 align:middle line:84% I think this very sudden and dramatic fall. 00:59:01.520 --> 00:59:07.750 align:middle line:84% Which again, every field of study went through some fall, 00:59:07.750 --> 00:59:10.957 align:middle line:84% but none so steeply or so quickly as physics. 00:59:10.957 --> 00:59:12.790 align:middle line:84% So we pause there and ask for some questions 00:59:12.790 --> 00:59:14.740 align:middle line:84% and we'll talk briefly about the last part. 00:59:14.740 --> 00:59:20.170 align:middle line:90% 00:59:20.170 --> 00:59:21.190 align:middle line:90% Oh, good. 00:59:21.190 --> 00:59:23.800 align:middle line:84% DA asks in the chat, how did the government cultivate interest 00:59:23.800 --> 00:59:24.640 align:middle line:90% in physics? 00:59:24.640 --> 00:59:25.360 align:middle line:90% Great question. 00:59:25.360 --> 00:59:27.070 align:middle line:84% Again, some wonderful things written about that. 00:59:27.070 --> 00:59:27.820 align:middle line:90% I've written some. 00:59:27.820 --> 00:59:29.650 align:middle line:84% Many colleagues written about it. 00:59:29.650 --> 00:59:31.710 align:middle line:84% One of the things that I find really astonishing 00:59:31.710 --> 00:59:33.460 align:middle line:84% about this time period is that physicists, 00:59:33.460 --> 00:59:36.520 align:middle line:84% if you can believe it, it will your imagination, 00:59:36.520 --> 00:59:38.680 align:middle line:90% became kind of rock stars. 00:59:38.680 --> 00:59:41.377 align:middle line:84% They were featured on the covers of Time Magazine. 00:59:41.377 --> 00:59:43.210 align:middle line:84% The word that was often used at the time was 00:59:43.210 --> 00:59:44.877 align:middle line:84% they were lionized, which is to say they 00:59:44.877 --> 00:59:47.440 align:middle line:84% were treated like celebrities speaking 00:59:47.440 --> 00:59:50.320 align:middle line:84% to League of Women Voters Luncheons, 00:59:50.320 --> 00:59:53.980 align:middle line:84% speaking to civic groups paraded into school auditoriums 00:59:53.980 --> 00:59:57.670 align:middle line:90% or assemblies for L23 students. 00:59:57.670 --> 01:00:03.910 align:middle line:84% In 1961 I think it was '61, Time Magazine 01:00:03.910 --> 01:00:07.900 align:middle line:84% named a dozen physicists, all white male physicists, 01:00:07.900 --> 01:00:09.425 align:middle line:90% people of the year. 01:00:09.425 --> 01:00:11.800 align:middle line:84% Time magazine for years ran the Person of the Year Award. 01:00:11.800 --> 01:00:14.590 align:middle line:84% And in '61, it was physics as embodied 01:00:14.590 --> 01:00:17.500 align:middle line:84% by 12 faces of renowned physicists 01:00:17.500 --> 01:00:19.210 align:middle line:90% as the people of the year. 01:00:19.210 --> 01:00:22.600 align:middle line:84% That same year, maybe 1963, in Gallup polls 01:00:22.600 --> 01:00:27.790 align:middle line:84% of the American population with public opinion polls, 01:00:27.790 --> 01:00:32.710 align:middle line:84% people were asked to rate the three most 01:00:32.710 --> 01:00:34.570 align:middle line:90% favorable professions. 01:00:34.570 --> 01:00:38.140 align:middle line:84% Three professions that are seen as most highly respected 01:00:38.140 --> 01:00:40.270 align:middle line:84% among the general American public. 01:00:40.270 --> 01:00:42.218 align:middle line:84% Number one was Supreme Court Justice. 01:00:42.218 --> 01:00:44.260 align:middle line:84% I don't know if that would be the same way today. 01:00:44.260 --> 01:00:47.500 align:middle line:84% But 1963, that was seen as above the fray in the most 01:00:47.500 --> 01:00:50.470 align:middle line:84% kind of laudatory role someone could aspire to. 01:00:50.470 --> 01:00:52.150 align:middle line:90% Number two is medical physician. 01:00:52.150 --> 01:00:53.920 align:middle line:84% Number three was nuclear physicist. 01:00:53.920 --> 01:00:56.350 align:middle line:84% So it was a combination of a sense 01:00:56.350 --> 01:00:59.980 align:middle line:84% that nuclear physicists had single-handedly built the bomb 01:00:59.980 --> 01:01:01.910 align:middle line:84% and, therefore, won the war, each part 01:01:01.910 --> 01:01:03.618 align:middle line:84% of which I think we've seen in this class 01:01:03.618 --> 01:01:06.740 align:middle line:84% was maybe a bit of an oversimplification, 01:01:06.740 --> 01:01:10.220 align:middle line:84% combined with this really kind of hero kind 01:01:10.220 --> 01:01:12.770 align:middle line:84% of treatment of young physicists, even those 01:01:12.770 --> 01:01:15.530 align:middle line:84% who had had no role whatsoever in the war. 01:01:15.530 --> 01:01:18.590 align:middle line:84% So there was a moment in time when physicists in the United 01:01:18.590 --> 01:01:21.590 align:middle line:84% States were treated really as kind of celebrities 01:01:21.590 --> 01:01:24.890 align:middle line:84% and also a very, very valuable resource in all too short 01:01:24.890 --> 01:01:25.670 align:middle line:90% of supply. 01:01:25.670 --> 01:01:29.630 align:middle line:84% So you have a lot of these cultural reinforcements that 01:01:29.630 --> 01:01:34.880 align:middle line:84% then get overlaid upon this kind of more politically driven post 01:01:34.880 --> 01:01:37.220 align:middle line:84% Sputnik cry to get lots and lots of people in defense, 01:01:37.220 --> 01:01:40.310 align:middle line:84% because the Soviets are somehow ahead of the United States 01:01:40.310 --> 01:01:41.670 align:middle line:90% in military technology. 01:01:41.670 --> 01:01:44.060 align:middle line:84% So that was at least the allegation. 01:01:44.060 --> 01:01:46.400 align:middle line:84% Fisher says it looks like the number of PhDs over time 01:01:46.400 --> 01:01:47.570 align:middle line:90% to the 1980s-- yeah. 01:01:47.570 --> 01:01:51.620 align:middle line:84% So I'll show later on what the graph looks like later on. 01:01:51.620 --> 01:01:52.730 align:middle line:90% That's right. 01:01:52.730 --> 01:01:55.190 align:middle line:84% And Jade perhaps rightly or wistfully 01:01:55.190 --> 01:01:57.290 align:middle line:90% says, a brief shining moment. 01:01:57.290 --> 01:01:59.270 align:middle line:84% You may recall from the very first lecture 01:01:59.270 --> 01:02:01.873 align:middle line:84% for this class, literally the first day, 01:02:01.873 --> 01:02:04.040 align:middle line:84% I shared with you a quotation from Harper's Magazine 01:02:04.040 --> 01:02:07.150 align:middle line:90% in 1946 or '48. 01:02:07.150 --> 01:02:08.260 align:middle line:90% Late '40s. 01:02:08.260 --> 01:02:10.360 align:middle line:84% And the columnists had said that physicists 01:02:10.360 --> 01:02:11.920 align:middle line:90% are in vogue these days. 01:02:11.920 --> 01:02:15.550 align:middle line:84% No dinner party is a success without at least one physicist. 01:02:15.550 --> 01:02:17.557 align:middle line:84% I always say, boy, you know something's 01:02:17.557 --> 01:02:20.140 align:middle line:84% changed if that was what people thought in the late '40s about 01:02:20.140 --> 01:02:22.930 align:middle line:84% physicists as the ideal dining companions. 01:02:22.930 --> 01:02:24.550 align:middle line:90% So a lot was reinforcing. 01:02:24.550 --> 01:02:26.260 align:middle line:84% There were overt incentive structures 01:02:26.260 --> 01:02:28.070 align:middle line:90% for kind of political decisions. 01:02:28.070 --> 01:02:31.360 align:middle line:84% And they were often in tandem with or reinforcing 01:02:31.360 --> 01:02:35.380 align:middle line:84% a kind of broader, maybe more diffuse kind of cultural notion 01:02:35.380 --> 01:02:37.690 align:middle line:84% that physicists, in particular nuclear physicists, 01:02:37.690 --> 01:02:40.190 align:middle line:90% were somehow at the top. 01:02:40.190 --> 01:02:41.740 align:middle line:84% Let me go on to the last part today. 01:02:41.740 --> 01:02:43.810 align:middle line:84% This is the part that's closest to the reading. 01:02:43.810 --> 01:02:45.497 align:middle line:84% And so I'll go quickly through it, 01:02:45.497 --> 01:02:47.830 align:middle line:84% but I do think it helps make sense of some of the trends 01:02:47.830 --> 01:02:49.810 align:middle line:84% we've been thinking about in the class so far. 01:02:49.810 --> 01:02:53.010 align:middle line:90% 01:02:53.010 --> 01:02:57.930 align:middle line:84% And that's to ask what happens to the study of physics 01:02:57.930 --> 01:03:00.030 align:middle line:84% when the number of people pursuing it 01:03:00.030 --> 01:03:01.620 align:middle line:90% grows exponentially? 01:03:01.620 --> 01:03:04.890 align:middle line:84% How does the world of ideas begin to react or change, 01:03:04.890 --> 01:03:08.490 align:middle line:84% not just the kind of enrollment patterns or degrees conferred? 01:03:08.490 --> 01:03:09.240 align:middle line:90% I love this photo. 01:03:09.240 --> 01:03:10.290 align:middle line:90% I always show this photo. 01:03:10.290 --> 01:03:12.720 align:middle line:84% This is actually Nobel laureate Val Fitch, a particle 01:03:12.720 --> 01:03:15.152 align:middle line:84% physicist, who about to be crushed to death 01:03:15.152 --> 01:03:16.110 align:middle line:90% by the Physical Review. 01:03:16.110 --> 01:03:18.210 align:middle line:90% It's like death by journal. 01:03:18.210 --> 01:03:20.710 align:middle line:84% Many of us think that scientific journals are deadly boring, 01:03:20.710 --> 01:03:22.320 align:middle line:90% but this is actual a weapon. 01:03:22.320 --> 01:03:24.060 align:middle line:84% So this is now stacked by decade. 01:03:24.060 --> 01:03:27.250 align:middle line:84% The journal began in the 1890s, 1900s, '10s, 01:03:27.250 --> 01:03:29.010 align:middle line:84% '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s. 01:03:29.010 --> 01:03:35.250 align:middle line:84% By the 1970s, there were 30,000 pages published per year 01:03:35.250 --> 01:03:37.410 align:middle line:84% across all the phys rev journals as opposed 01:03:37.410 --> 01:03:39.140 align:middle line:84% to a tiny fraction at that point. 01:03:39.140 --> 01:03:41.280 align:middle line:84% And can see they're tracing out basically 01:03:41.280 --> 01:03:45.490 align:middle line:84% that same exponential curve as the number of new PhD students. 01:03:45.490 --> 01:03:46.740 align:middle line:90% Of course, they went together. 01:03:46.740 --> 01:03:49.320 align:middle line:84% All those PhD students had to write a thesis on something 01:03:49.320 --> 01:03:50.070 align:middle line:90% and publish it. 01:03:50.070 --> 01:03:51.570 align:middle line:84% So I wanted to ask what's it like 01:03:51.570 --> 01:03:53.195 align:middle line:84% to be a physics student under these two 01:03:53.195 --> 01:03:54.940 align:middle line:90% very different regimes? 01:03:54.940 --> 01:03:58.180 align:middle line:84% So let's try to look at apples to apples as best we can. 01:03:58.180 --> 01:04:00.280 align:middle line:84% Here's one instructor who happens 01:04:00.280 --> 01:04:03.190 align:middle line:84% to be a rather popular one named Richard Feynman, 01:04:03.190 --> 01:04:04.710 align:middle line:90% teaching at Caltech. 01:04:04.710 --> 01:04:08.590 align:middle line:84% The first one here with his necktie on in 1962, much 01:04:08.590 --> 01:04:11.860 align:middle line:84% like those photos of Tony French here at MIT. 01:04:11.860 --> 01:04:15.460 align:middle line:84% Very large stadium tiered auditorium seating 01:04:15.460 --> 01:04:17.230 align:middle line:90% with hundreds of students. 01:04:17.230 --> 01:04:21.490 align:middle line:84% And here just 13 years later after that bust 01:04:21.490 --> 01:04:23.150 align:middle line:84% teaching admittedly a different course 01:04:23.150 --> 01:04:24.650 align:middle line:84% but what he used to call his physics 01:04:24.650 --> 01:04:27.460 align:middle line:84% ex course with about a dozen students. 01:04:27.460 --> 01:04:29.180 align:middle line:90% Much has changed. 01:04:29.180 --> 01:04:32.470 align:middle line:84% He's lost his necktie, his collar, and his pants 01:04:32.470 --> 01:04:34.900 align:middle line:90% cuffs are both much more wide. 01:04:34.900 --> 01:04:36.335 align:middle line:90% Feynman's own hair is longer. 01:04:36.335 --> 01:04:38.710 align:middle line:84% I don't know what's going on with these feet on the desk. 01:04:38.710 --> 01:04:41.170 align:middle line:84% Things have changed, again, culturally as well as 01:04:41.170 --> 01:04:42.850 align:middle line:90% kind of numerically. 01:04:42.850 --> 01:04:45.080 align:middle line:84% What's it like to become a young physicist 01:04:45.080 --> 01:04:49.210 align:middle line:84% under these two quite starkly different sets of conditions? 01:04:49.210 --> 01:04:51.100 align:middle line:84% And I wanted to track that by looking 01:04:51.100 --> 01:04:53.860 align:middle line:84% at the training of first year grad students 01:04:53.860 --> 01:04:56.240 align:middle line:84% in a particular subject that's near, I think, 01:04:56.240 --> 01:04:58.550 align:middle line:84% to many of our hearts, quantum mechanics. 01:04:58.550 --> 01:05:00.550 align:middle line:84% This is exactly the period in time 01:05:00.550 --> 01:05:03.520 align:middle line:84% when at least one course in quantum mechanics 01:05:03.520 --> 01:05:06.880 align:middle line:84% became required of all grad students in physics in the US. 01:05:06.880 --> 01:05:08.920 align:middle line:84% It was an elective in many places 01:05:08.920 --> 01:05:10.420 align:middle line:90% until soon after the wall. 01:05:10.420 --> 01:05:14.330 align:middle line:84% So we have one kind of way to, again, compare like with like. 01:05:14.330 --> 01:05:16.570 align:middle line:84% And so this is a topic that, again, 01:05:16.570 --> 01:05:20.230 align:middle line:84% as we've seen in our own class, had been the subject of 01:05:20.230 --> 01:05:23.830 align:middle line:84% or treated to overtly philosophical discussion 01:05:23.830 --> 01:05:25.990 align:middle line:84% by many, many leading physicists who 01:05:25.990 --> 01:05:29.200 align:middle line:84% helped invent quantum theory in the 1920s and '30s. 01:05:29.200 --> 01:05:32.080 align:middle line:84% We looked a bit at things like the Einstein board debate. 01:05:32.080 --> 01:05:35.350 align:middle line:84% It turns out they filled their own textbooks-- 01:05:35.350 --> 01:05:38.680 align:middle line:84% they didn't fill, but that philosophical mode 01:05:38.680 --> 01:05:42.820 align:middle line:84% of interpretation shows up in their explicitly pedagogical 01:05:42.820 --> 01:05:43.950 align:middle line:90% materials as well. 01:05:43.950 --> 01:05:46.450 align:middle line:84% Now, they would disagree about which philosophical tradition 01:05:46.450 --> 01:05:47.560 align:middle line:90% they found most helpful. 01:05:47.560 --> 01:05:51.070 align:middle line:84% Some turn to the German idealism of Immanuel Kant. 01:05:51.070 --> 01:05:52.720 align:middle line:84% Several turned, like Einstein himself 01:05:52.720 --> 01:05:54.940 align:middle line:84% had done to Ernst Mach, all kinds 01:05:54.940 --> 01:05:58.570 align:middle line:84% of favorite philosophical or interpretive traditions. 01:05:58.570 --> 01:06:00.165 align:middle line:84% But they all agree that this was part 01:06:00.165 --> 01:06:02.290 align:middle line:84% of what it meant to be a physicist and part of what 01:06:02.290 --> 01:06:05.770 align:middle line:84% it meant in particular to learn about quantum theory. 01:06:05.770 --> 01:06:08.080 align:middle line:84% Before the Second World War, this part 01:06:08.080 --> 01:06:12.640 align:middle line:84% actually surprised me, that was also true in the United States. 01:06:12.640 --> 01:06:16.300 align:middle line:84% If you look at all the leading instructors in the new quantum 01:06:16.300 --> 01:06:19.930 align:middle line:84% theory in the US, the early textbooks, their own lecture 01:06:19.930 --> 01:06:21.850 align:middle line:84% notes that survived, student reminiscences, 01:06:21.850 --> 01:06:24.400 align:middle line:84% homework problems, and so on, that there also 01:06:24.400 --> 01:06:27.790 align:middle line:84% was an explicitly kind of interpretive or philosophical 01:06:27.790 --> 01:06:29.500 align:middle line:90% approach to quantum theory. 01:06:29.500 --> 01:06:32.230 align:middle line:84% Again, they would often appeal to different philosophical 01:06:32.230 --> 01:06:35.080 align:middle line:84% traditions than many of the continental Europeans. 01:06:35.080 --> 01:06:37.480 align:middle line:84% Rarely would they appeal to Immanuel Kant. 01:06:37.480 --> 01:06:39.940 align:middle line:84% But there was a notion, an explicit one, 01:06:39.940 --> 01:06:42.250 align:middle line:84% set in the opening prefaces of the famous books 01:06:42.250 --> 01:06:44.950 align:middle line:84% by these authors and throughout the lecture notes 01:06:44.950 --> 01:06:47.980 align:middle line:84% from Oppenheimer's very famous course at Berkeley 01:06:47.980 --> 01:06:50.950 align:middle line:84% that part of the job of reckoning with quantum theory 01:06:50.950 --> 01:06:54.550 align:middle line:84% is adopting an explicitly philosophical mode to try 01:06:54.550 --> 01:06:56.230 align:middle line:84% to understand these kind of puzzles, 01:06:56.230 --> 01:06:58.030 align:middle line:84% like things like Schrodinger's cat 01:06:58.030 --> 01:07:01.092 align:middle line:84% or the restriction to probabilities and determinism, 01:07:01.092 --> 01:07:03.550 align:middle line:84% things that we at least talk briefly about in our own class 01:07:03.550 --> 01:07:04.130 align:middle line:90% here. 01:07:04.130 --> 01:07:05.800 align:middle line:84% Well, my favorite source of that is 01:07:05.800 --> 01:07:08.200 align:middle line:84% a series of notebooks that are preserved 01:07:08.200 --> 01:07:10.690 align:middle line:90% in Caltech's archives. 01:07:10.690 --> 01:07:13.780 align:middle line:90% They span from 1929 to 1969. 01:07:13.780 --> 01:07:15.760 align:middle line:90% Unbroken 30 year period. 01:07:15.760 --> 01:07:19.150 align:middle line:84% These were communal notebooks passed down among the physics 01:07:19.150 --> 01:07:22.000 align:middle line:84% PhD students and then finally grabbed and preserved 01:07:22.000 --> 01:07:23.620 align:middle line:90% 30 years later. 01:07:23.620 --> 01:07:25.510 align:middle line:84% When the students would narrate how 01:07:25.510 --> 01:07:27.430 align:middle line:84% they prepared for their general exam 01:07:27.430 --> 01:07:30.040 align:middle line:84% was an oral exam only for the PhD students. 01:07:30.040 --> 01:07:31.220 align:middle line:90% No written exam. 01:07:31.220 --> 01:07:32.860 align:middle line:84% So the students would say I studied 01:07:32.860 --> 01:07:34.660 align:middle line:84% this and this and here are the questions I was asked 01:07:34.660 --> 01:07:37.035 align:middle line:84% so that you could pass it along and help your friends who 01:07:37.035 --> 01:07:38.900 align:middle line:84% would come to the exam a little later. 01:07:38.900 --> 01:07:43.000 align:middle line:84% So read these accounts of the exam at Caltech 01:07:43.000 --> 01:07:46.000 align:middle line:84% for your PhD qualifying exam in physics. 01:07:46.000 --> 01:07:47.800 align:middle line:84% And in the '30s, indeed, they were 01:07:47.800 --> 01:07:49.870 align:middle line:84% pressed to calculate certain things 01:07:49.870 --> 01:07:52.750 align:middle line:84% but also pressed to give kind of interpretive answers 01:07:52.750 --> 01:07:54.880 align:middle line:84% to some of these quandaries of quantum theory. 01:07:54.880 --> 01:07:57.490 align:middle line:84% And likewise, if you look at lecture notes, textbooks, book 01:07:57.490 --> 01:08:01.480 align:middle line:84% reviews in the '30s, you see that rapidly as well. 01:08:01.480 --> 01:08:04.330 align:middle line:84% What happens very quickly after the end of the war 01:08:04.330 --> 01:08:06.730 align:middle line:84% is that that just vanishes in the United States. 01:08:06.730 --> 01:08:09.040 align:middle line:84% I mean, it just vanishes very quickly. 01:08:09.040 --> 01:08:11.830 align:middle line:84% Again, many ways to measure this. 01:08:11.830 --> 01:08:15.040 align:middle line:84% One of my favorites, a statement from MIT's own Herman Feshbach, 01:08:15.040 --> 01:08:18.310 align:middle line:84% very, very prominent nuclear physicist, helped 01:08:18.310 --> 01:08:21.010 align:middle line:84% found our Center for Theoretical Physics, very prominent. 01:08:21.010 --> 01:08:23.170 align:middle line:84% And he wrote in '62, in his words, 01:08:23.170 --> 01:08:25.210 align:middle line:84% enough with this musty atavistic to do 01:08:25.210 --> 01:08:26.500 align:middle line:90% about position and momentum. 01:08:26.500 --> 01:08:28.930 align:middle line:84% He's like, enough fretting over the kind 01:08:28.930 --> 01:08:31.660 align:middle line:84% of philosophical implications of the uncertainty principle. 01:08:31.660 --> 01:08:33.160 align:middle line:84% We have all this stuff to calculate. 01:08:33.160 --> 01:08:37.689 align:middle line:84% And a kind of common phrase that was uttered kind of half 01:08:37.689 --> 01:08:40.810 align:middle line:84% jokingly at the time was the phrase shut up and calculate. 01:08:40.810 --> 01:08:42.520 align:middle line:84% Meaning don't stay up all night wondering 01:08:42.520 --> 01:08:44.439 align:middle line:84% about the grand mysteries of quantum theory. 01:08:44.439 --> 01:08:45.910 align:middle line:84% Learn how to do your problem sets, 01:08:45.910 --> 01:08:51.580 align:middle line:84% which now were winnowing to be almost exclusively calculation 01:08:51.580 --> 01:08:55.218 align:middle line:84% and not kind of verbal or essay like response. 01:08:55.218 --> 01:08:57.010 align:middle line:84% So again, we can go back to those notebooks 01:08:57.010 --> 01:08:59.410 align:middle line:84% from Caltech, these kind of continuous record 01:08:59.410 --> 01:09:02.415 align:middle line:84% of the qualifying exam for the Caltech physics students. 01:09:02.415 --> 01:09:03.790 align:middle line:84% And you see some of these entries 01:09:03.790 --> 01:09:07.000 align:middle line:84% in the early '50s of students who are kind of shocked. 01:09:07.000 --> 01:09:09.220 align:middle line:84% They actually feel cheated because they'd 01:09:09.220 --> 01:09:11.529 align:middle line:84% studied years and years of these older 01:09:11.529 --> 01:09:14.290 align:middle line:84% accounts of the types of questions they would likely 01:09:14.290 --> 01:09:15.229 align:middle line:90% be asked on the exam. 01:09:15.229 --> 01:09:16.840 align:middle line:84% And then they didn't show up when 01:09:16.840 --> 01:09:20.500 align:middle line:84% those students in the early '50s actually sat for their exams. 01:09:20.500 --> 01:09:22.510 align:middle line:84% They write things like the effort invested 01:09:22.510 --> 01:09:25.270 align:middle line:84% in analysis of paradoxes and queer logical points 01:09:25.270 --> 01:09:27.939 align:middle line:90% was of no use in the exam. 01:09:27.939 --> 01:09:31.760 align:middle line:84% The student was only asked to solve certain problems. 01:09:31.760 --> 01:09:33.520 align:middle line:84% Another student says, the best advice 01:09:33.520 --> 01:09:35.979 align:middle line:84% is to memorize and rehearse the stock problems 01:09:35.979 --> 01:09:38.600 align:middle line:84% or give what he calls the usual spiel. 01:09:38.600 --> 01:09:40.640 align:middle line:84% They will not ask you to wax poetic 01:09:40.640 --> 01:09:42.890 align:middle line:84% about the fall of determinism, whereas they had really 01:09:42.890 --> 01:09:46.490 align:middle line:84% been asking that question only a generation or two earlier. 01:09:46.490 --> 01:09:48.590 align:middle line:84% Likewise, the newer textbooks now 01:09:48.590 --> 01:09:51.050 align:middle line:84% get praised in the published book reviews for, 01:09:51.050 --> 01:09:53.300 align:middle line:84% quote, "avoiding philosophical discussion 01:09:53.300 --> 01:09:55.550 align:middle line:84% or omitting this distracting philosophically 01:09:55.550 --> 01:09:56.510 align:middle line:90% tainted questions." 01:09:56.510 --> 01:10:00.440 align:middle line:84% You see this very stark shift also in other written exams 01:10:00.440 --> 01:10:02.240 align:middle line:84% and problem sets across the country. 01:10:02.240 --> 01:10:05.090 align:middle line:84% So between the '30s and the '50s, something really stark 01:10:05.090 --> 01:10:06.290 align:middle line:90% has changed. 01:10:06.290 --> 01:10:08.030 align:middle line:84% How might we account for that shift? 01:10:08.030 --> 01:10:11.750 align:middle line:84% We might say, well, these were open questions in the '30s, 01:10:11.750 --> 01:10:13.700 align:middle line:84% but maybe they were just solved by the '50s. 01:10:13.700 --> 01:10:16.370 align:middle line:84% I mean, I chuckle because, of course, we know as many of us 01:10:16.370 --> 01:10:17.870 align:middle line:84% have been discussing in office hours 01:10:17.870 --> 01:10:19.520 align:middle line:84% they haven't been solved to this day. 01:10:19.520 --> 01:10:22.700 align:middle line:84% These are still open questions subject now 01:10:22.700 --> 01:10:25.550 align:middle line:84% to very active research even in the United States 01:10:25.550 --> 01:10:28.670 align:middle line:84% and even then in the '50s were being pursued actively 01:10:28.670 --> 01:10:30.650 align:middle line:84% by some physicists outside the United States. 01:10:30.650 --> 01:10:33.050 align:middle line:84% So it wasn't that the philosophical challenges 01:10:33.050 --> 01:10:35.330 align:middle line:90% had gone away. 01:10:35.330 --> 01:10:38.090 align:middle line:84% Another answer that I find much more compelling, much more 01:10:38.090 --> 01:10:40.250 align:middle line:84% interesting, is written by two of my own mentors. 01:10:40.250 --> 01:10:43.250 align:middle line:84% So I guess I have to like it, but I do. 01:10:43.250 --> 01:10:45.890 align:middle line:84% Both Sam Schuaver and Peter Galison, among others, 01:10:45.890 --> 01:10:47.540 align:middle line:84% have written that maybe it was what 01:10:47.540 --> 01:10:49.003 align:middle line:84% happened between the '30s and '50s 01:10:49.003 --> 01:10:50.420 align:middle line:84% that could account for the change. 01:10:50.420 --> 01:10:54.560 align:middle line:84% In particular, this really massive, unprecedented effort 01:10:54.560 --> 01:10:56.780 align:middle line:84% by physicists and engineers and chemists 01:10:56.780 --> 01:10:58.850 align:middle line:84% and so on during the Second World War. 01:10:58.850 --> 01:11:02.480 align:middle line:84% If you're working in the midst of factory sized kind of time 01:11:02.480 --> 01:11:04.610 align:middle line:84% sensitive, mission oriented projects 01:11:04.610 --> 01:11:07.670 align:middle line:84% like isotope separation, like radar, 01:11:07.670 --> 01:11:10.670 align:middle line:84% you don't have time for kind of philosophical niceties. 01:11:10.670 --> 01:11:15.230 align:middle line:84% And both Sam and Peter find just really compelling examples 01:11:15.230 --> 01:11:17.810 align:middle line:84% of physicists saying stop doing what we used to do. 01:11:17.810 --> 01:11:18.560 align:middle line:90% There's a war on. 01:11:18.560 --> 01:11:23.030 align:middle line:84% Get the numbers out was a phrase that Sam in particular 01:11:23.030 --> 01:11:25.250 align:middle line:84% would use to characterize this period. 01:11:25.250 --> 01:11:27.680 align:middle line:84% And yet I found from going through the archives 01:11:27.680 --> 01:11:31.880 align:middle line:84% and collecting unpublished lecture notes from physicists 01:11:31.880 --> 01:11:34.070 align:middle line:84% at a range of institutions during the '50s, 01:11:34.070 --> 01:11:36.200 align:middle line:84% not just during the '30s, that that 01:11:36.200 --> 01:11:37.790 align:middle line:90% wouldn't account for the shift. 01:11:37.790 --> 01:11:42.110 align:middle line:84% The folks I was looking at were often highly placed veterans 01:11:42.110 --> 01:11:43.640 align:middle line:84% from the wartime projects, people 01:11:43.640 --> 01:11:45.950 align:middle line:84% who had very extensive roles at Oak Ridge, Los 01:11:45.950 --> 01:11:48.590 align:middle line:84% Alamos, and the Rad Lab during the war, 01:11:48.590 --> 01:11:52.100 align:middle line:84% and yet went back to their home institutions after the war 01:11:52.100 --> 01:11:56.420 align:middle line:84% and taught quantum mechanics in this comparable kind of overtly 01:11:56.420 --> 01:11:58.850 align:middle line:84% philosophical vein like in the '30s. 01:11:58.850 --> 01:12:00.800 align:middle line:84% So it can't be that somehow the war 01:12:00.800 --> 01:12:02.870 align:middle line:84% was this unique explanation, even 01:12:02.870 --> 01:12:05.120 align:middle line:84% though I do think there's a lot of compelling evidence 01:12:05.120 --> 01:12:06.290 align:middle line:90% about a shift. 01:12:06.290 --> 01:12:08.240 align:middle line:84% Maybe we might say after the war, 01:12:08.240 --> 01:12:11.360 align:middle line:84% it was a change in who wanted to hire these physicists. 01:12:11.360 --> 01:12:16.760 align:middle line:84% After all, 1953 was the first year in US history 01:12:16.760 --> 01:12:20.630 align:middle line:84% in which more physics PhDs were hired in industrial jobs 01:12:20.630 --> 01:12:21.750 align:middle line:90% than academic ones. 01:12:21.750 --> 01:12:23.870 align:middle line:84% So the industrial research in physics 01:12:23.870 --> 01:12:26.660 align:middle line:84% was really growing rapidly in the United States in the '50s. 01:12:26.660 --> 01:12:29.990 align:middle line:84% And again, maybe if you're working at Westinghouse or Bell 01:12:29.990 --> 01:12:32.690 align:middle line:84% Telephone or many, many others, maybe you 01:12:32.690 --> 01:12:34.130 align:middle line:84% don't need to worry about the kind 01:12:34.130 --> 01:12:38.120 align:middle line:84% of epistemological philosophical questions about Schrodinger's 01:12:38.120 --> 01:12:38.630 align:middle line:90% cat. 01:12:38.630 --> 01:12:42.107 align:middle line:84% And yet because of the Cold War fears 01:12:42.107 --> 01:12:44.690 align:middle line:84% about where the physicists were and how they could be tracked, 01:12:44.690 --> 01:12:46.790 align:middle line:84% we have an enormous amount of information 01:12:46.790 --> 01:12:48.650 align:middle line:84% about this generation, where they 01:12:48.650 --> 01:12:50.600 align:middle line:84% were trained, where they got their jobs, who 01:12:50.600 --> 01:12:51.890 align:middle line:90% moved to what position when. 01:12:51.890 --> 01:12:54.560 align:middle line:84% So you can actually do a statistical sample 01:12:54.560 --> 01:12:57.290 align:middle line:84% and find there was literally no correlation. 01:12:57.290 --> 01:13:00.200 align:middle line:84% In fact, some strong anti-correlations 01:13:00.200 --> 01:13:06.590 align:middle line:84% between where an individual got jobs, got a position after PhD, 01:13:06.590 --> 01:13:09.575 align:middle line:84% and the type of course they had for quantum mechanics 01:13:09.575 --> 01:13:10.700 align:middle line:90% during their graduate work. 01:13:10.700 --> 01:13:14.455 align:middle line:84% This was not a kind of job market driven shift either. 01:13:14.455 --> 01:13:15.830 align:middle line:84% So what it led me to, and this is 01:13:15.830 --> 01:13:19.400 align:middle line:84% where you'll read in the piece, was to ask about 01:13:19.400 --> 01:13:22.970 align:middle line:84% is this a kind of legacy of bloated classrooms 01:13:22.970 --> 01:13:25.050 align:middle line:84% that were changing very, very rapidly? 01:13:25.050 --> 01:13:27.590 align:middle line:84% So if so, how might we assess that? 01:13:27.590 --> 01:13:29.090 align:middle line:84% And here I'll boil down a lot that's 01:13:29.090 --> 01:13:31.190 align:middle line:90% written a bit more in the essay. 01:13:31.190 --> 01:13:35.450 align:middle line:84% One thing I did was collect all of the lecture 01:13:35.450 --> 01:13:38.070 align:middle line:84% notes I could find, mostly unpublished lecture notes, 01:13:38.070 --> 01:13:41.730 align:middle line:84% from the 1950s from, again, this same kind of course. 01:13:41.730 --> 01:13:43.890 align:middle line:84% First year graduate level quantum 01:13:43.890 --> 01:13:46.350 align:middle line:84% mechanics to try to compare apples with apples. 01:13:46.350 --> 01:13:51.030 align:middle line:84% Then separately assess the enrollment of those courses. 01:13:51.030 --> 01:13:52.860 align:middle line:84% Sometimes it was actually in the archives. 01:13:52.860 --> 01:13:54.402 align:middle line:84% I could see Hans Bethe's grade sheet. 01:13:54.402 --> 01:13:56.777 align:middle line:84% I know which of his students got a B+ and I know how many 01:13:56.777 --> 01:13:58.110 align:middle line:90% students were in the class. 01:13:58.110 --> 01:14:00.000 align:middle line:84% Other times the University registrar's still 01:14:00.000 --> 01:14:01.830 align:middle line:84% have records or other ways to get this. 01:14:01.830 --> 01:14:05.730 align:middle line:84% So you can look for correlations between class size 01:14:05.730 --> 01:14:08.430 align:middle line:84% and the nature of discussion of the quantum 01:14:08.430 --> 01:14:10.290 align:middle line:90% theory in those classes. 01:14:10.290 --> 01:14:14.980 align:middle line:84% And again, to boil down a lot, to be kind of overly precise, 01:14:14.980 --> 01:14:17.190 align:middle line:84% these numbers should be read with grains of salt. 01:14:17.190 --> 01:14:21.420 align:middle line:84% But a shift in a factor of 3 in the average enrollment size, 01:14:21.420 --> 01:14:25.350 align:middle line:84% a larger class by a factor of 3, was accompanied by a fall 01:14:25.350 --> 01:14:29.040 align:middle line:84% by something like a factor of 5, by a very dramatic, very 01:14:29.040 --> 01:14:32.700 align:middle line:84% noticeable shift, in the number of, say, pages of the lecture 01:14:32.700 --> 01:14:35.370 align:middle line:84% notes devoted to anything we might generously 01:14:35.370 --> 01:14:39.370 align:middle line:84% consider philosophical, speculative, or interpretive. 01:14:39.370 --> 01:14:42.220 align:middle line:84% So that's one moment in time over the '50s. 01:14:42.220 --> 01:14:44.650 align:middle line:84% Then I also wanted to look across time, what historians 01:14:44.650 --> 01:14:46.120 align:middle line:90% would call diachronically. 01:14:46.120 --> 01:14:49.270 align:middle line:84% So with the help of several grad student research assistants, 01:14:49.270 --> 01:14:51.880 align:middle line:84% I looked at all of the graduate level textbooks 01:14:51.880 --> 01:14:54.430 align:middle line:84% on quantum mechanics that were aimed at that same audience, 01:14:54.430 --> 01:14:56.560 align:middle line:84% first year grad quantum mechanics courses. 01:14:56.560 --> 01:15:00.160 align:middle line:84% All of them that were published in English during this 30 year 01:15:00.160 --> 01:15:01.270 align:middle line:90% period after the war. 01:15:01.270 --> 01:15:03.640 align:middle line:84% And then we looked at all of the homework problems that 01:15:03.640 --> 01:15:04.570 align:middle line:90% appear in those books. 01:15:04.570 --> 01:15:06.122 align:middle line:90% There's 6,000 homework problems. 01:15:06.122 --> 01:15:08.080 align:middle line:84% Actually there's, of course, many redundancies. 01:15:08.080 --> 01:15:10.205 align:middle line:84% The same problems get repeated over and over again. 01:15:10.205 --> 01:15:12.970 align:middle line:84% And again, we can look at trends and how many of those homework 01:15:12.970 --> 01:15:15.970 align:middle line:84% problems in the textbooks asked for any kind 01:15:15.970 --> 01:15:18.380 align:middle line:84% of verbal or interpretive answer. 01:15:18.380 --> 01:15:20.140 align:middle line:84% How many of them were short essay? 01:15:20.140 --> 01:15:24.370 align:middle line:84% Write out an answer in reasoning in sentences and paragraphs 01:15:24.370 --> 01:15:27.770 align:middle line:84% versus calculation and circling your answer at the end. 01:15:27.770 --> 01:15:29.680 align:middle line:84% So what I'm showing here is the proportion 01:15:29.680 --> 01:15:32.530 align:middle line:84% of the questions that asked for an essay 01:15:32.530 --> 01:15:37.240 align:middle line:84% like a brief short answer, paragraph structured response. 01:15:37.240 --> 01:15:40.130 align:middle line:84% And it hovers at around 10% while the enrollments 01:15:40.130 --> 01:15:41.030 align:middle line:90% grow rapidly. 01:15:41.030 --> 01:15:44.240 align:middle line:84% And then look at this transition to an absolutely explosion 01:15:44.240 --> 01:15:47.720 align:middle line:84% to reaching almost 50% where kind of essay or discussion 01:15:47.720 --> 01:15:49.760 align:middle line:84% questions in these books published soon 01:15:49.760 --> 01:15:52.100 align:middle line:90% after that bubble had burst. 01:15:52.100 --> 01:15:56.150 align:middle line:84% A couple of more kind of archival examples. 01:15:56.150 --> 01:15:58.880 align:middle line:84% Are these general trends kind of playing out on the ground? 01:15:58.880 --> 01:16:00.547 align:middle line:84% And here's just two more that I'll share 01:16:00.547 --> 01:16:01.790 align:middle line:90% with you before I wrap up. 01:16:01.790 --> 01:16:03.350 align:middle line:84% There's one example I found again 01:16:03.350 --> 01:16:06.740 align:middle line:84% in the archives at Berkeley in the early or mid 1950s. 01:16:06.740 --> 01:16:09.080 align:middle line:84% This was a young assistant professor, 01:16:09.080 --> 01:16:12.830 align:middle line:84% tenure track professor named Roland Good, who was interested 01:16:12.830 --> 01:16:16.370 align:middle line:84% in some of the kind of foundational aspects of quantum 01:16:16.370 --> 01:16:19.020 align:middle line:84% mechanics, including quantum field theory. 01:16:19.020 --> 01:16:22.160 align:middle line:90% He was ultimately not promoted. 01:16:22.160 --> 01:16:24.200 align:middle line:90% He was denied tenure. 01:16:24.200 --> 01:16:26.092 align:middle line:84% And that always leaves a large paper trail. 01:16:26.092 --> 01:16:27.800 align:middle line:84% It's actually hard to deny someone tenure 01:16:27.800 --> 01:16:30.120 align:middle line:84% because you write a lot of reports, then as now. 01:16:30.120 --> 01:16:31.820 align:middle line:84% And so if you look at the reports of why 01:16:31.820 --> 01:16:35.030 align:middle line:84% was Roland Good not promoted, they 01:16:35.030 --> 01:16:37.520 align:middle line:84% say that his choice of research topic 01:16:37.520 --> 01:16:39.500 align:middle line:90% was pedagogically inappropriate. 01:16:39.500 --> 01:16:42.740 align:middle line:84% He wasn't generating doable homework problems 01:16:42.740 --> 01:16:45.380 align:middle line:84% for his students, especially for his PhD students. 01:16:45.380 --> 01:16:49.040 align:middle line:84% And because Berkeley had such a huge population 01:16:49.040 --> 01:16:52.400 align:middle line:84% of overwhelmingly white male PhD students 01:16:52.400 --> 01:16:54.680 align:middle line:84% in physics, that every faculty member had 01:16:54.680 --> 01:16:58.430 align:middle line:84% to be a kind of engine, a factory producing 01:16:58.430 --> 01:16:59.270 align:middle line:90% dissertations. 01:16:59.270 --> 01:17:01.790 align:middle line:84% And Roland Good's choice of topic 01:17:01.790 --> 01:17:05.870 align:middle line:84% by being more overtly interpretive or philosophical, 01:17:05.870 --> 01:17:06.815 align:middle line:90% it was a poor fit. 01:17:06.815 --> 01:17:08.690 align:middle line:84% And so he wouldn't be promoted even though it 01:17:08.690 --> 01:17:11.690 align:middle line:84% was a productive researcher and an effective teacher, 01:17:11.690 --> 01:17:13.040 align:middle line:90% according to reports. 01:17:13.040 --> 01:17:14.150 align:middle line:90% Last example of that. 01:17:14.150 --> 01:17:17.420 align:middle line:84% I looked just nearby Berkeley at Stanford. 01:17:17.420 --> 01:17:20.030 align:middle line:84% Their department was always much smaller than Berkeley's. 01:17:20.030 --> 01:17:22.430 align:middle line:84% But in relative terms went through, again, its own kind 01:17:22.430 --> 01:17:23.750 align:middle line:90% of boom and bust cycle. 01:17:23.750 --> 01:17:27.050 align:middle line:84% It grew much larger compared to its older 01:17:27.050 --> 01:17:29.640 align:middle line:90% kind of capacity very rapidly. 01:17:29.640 --> 01:17:32.660 align:middle line:84% And again, you see this remarkable correlation in time 01:17:32.660 --> 01:17:37.310 align:middle line:84% as incoming cohorts grow from 10's to 20's in the earlier 01:17:37.310 --> 01:17:41.270 align:middle line:84% period up to nearly 50 a year, high 40's per year. 01:17:41.270 --> 01:17:44.345 align:middle line:84% The faculty get overwhelmed doing 01:17:44.345 --> 01:17:45.470 align:middle line:90% all these qualifying exams. 01:17:45.470 --> 01:17:48.320 align:middle line:84% They switch to a true false general exam. 01:17:48.320 --> 01:17:51.050 align:middle line:84% For a period of almost 20 years, you 01:17:51.050 --> 01:17:53.390 align:middle line:84% can get your PhD in physics at Stanford 01:17:53.390 --> 01:17:56.090 align:middle line:84% on the basis of a true false qualifying exam. 01:17:56.090 --> 01:17:57.900 align:middle line:90% I'll let that sink in. 01:17:57.900 --> 01:17:59.930 align:middle line:84% Meanwhile, just as it did everywhere, 01:17:59.930 --> 01:18:02.390 align:middle line:84% enrollments crashed, fell by more than half 01:18:02.390 --> 01:18:03.800 align:middle line:90% in about two years. 01:18:03.800 --> 01:18:07.040 align:middle line:84% And as the numbers fall, then kind of coincidentally, 01:18:07.040 --> 01:18:10.358 align:middle line:84% or at least correlated in time, the faculty 01:18:10.358 --> 01:18:11.900 align:middle line:84% say, no, actually our students should 01:18:11.900 --> 01:18:14.067 align:middle line:84% be better prepared to discuss these things in words. 01:18:14.067 --> 01:18:18.050 align:middle line:84% So 40% of the revised general exams become essay questions. 01:18:18.050 --> 01:18:19.970 align:middle line:84% Literally write out interpretive answers 01:18:19.970 --> 01:18:23.750 align:middle line:84% as opposed to true false and so on. 01:18:23.750 --> 01:18:26.040 align:middle line:84% So I find those trends really quite striking. 01:18:26.040 --> 01:18:27.710 align:middle line:84% So this is now my final set of slides. 01:18:27.710 --> 01:18:29.118 align:middle line:90% I'll wrap up very, very quickly. 01:18:29.118 --> 01:18:31.160 align:middle line:84% Going back to that early article that I mentioned 01:18:31.160 --> 01:18:33.440 align:middle line:84% by Paul Forman, Forman was convinced 01:18:33.440 --> 01:18:37.310 align:middle line:84% that this overwhelming military sponsorship of funding 01:18:37.310 --> 01:18:39.960 align:middle line:84% for basic research had changed what it meant to do physics. 01:18:39.960 --> 01:18:42.890 align:middle line:84% In his famous words, physicists pretended 01:18:42.890 --> 01:18:46.040 align:middle line:84% a fundamental character to their work that it scarcely had. 01:18:46.040 --> 01:18:49.550 align:middle line:84% They become merely instrumental to their military patrons. 01:18:49.550 --> 01:18:50.900 align:middle line:90% He says they sold out. 01:18:50.900 --> 01:18:54.140 align:middle line:84% This really is a kind of one dimensional analysis 01:18:54.140 --> 01:18:56.330 align:middle line:84% that somehow money from the Pentagon 01:18:56.330 --> 01:18:57.890 align:middle line:90% changed the world of ideas. 01:18:57.890 --> 01:18:59.390 align:middle line:90% It certainly had an impact. 01:18:59.390 --> 01:19:02.060 align:middle line:84% But it seems to me that what's missing 01:19:02.060 --> 01:19:04.310 align:middle line:84% from those kinds of explanations is 01:19:04.310 --> 01:19:07.670 align:middle line:84% the way the money gets used, the decisions about what 01:19:07.670 --> 01:19:11.960 align:middle line:84% one does with this suddenly very fast changing infrastructure. 01:19:11.960 --> 01:19:15.380 align:middle line:84% How do people learn in institutions as opposed 01:19:15.380 --> 01:19:17.833 align:middle line:90% to react to budget lines? 01:19:17.833 --> 01:19:19.250 align:middle line:84% And then we start asking questions 01:19:19.250 --> 01:19:21.980 align:middle line:84% about enrollment patterns, about the nature 01:19:21.980 --> 01:19:25.910 align:middle line:84% of the instrumentation, and about the kind of arrangement 01:19:25.910 --> 01:19:27.050 align:middle line:90% of the world of ideas. 01:19:27.050 --> 01:19:29.300 align:middle line:84% Then I think we can start asking about did 01:19:29.300 --> 01:19:31.160 align:middle line:84% the character of research and teaching 01:19:31.160 --> 01:19:34.290 align:middle line:84% start to shift during this Cold War period? 01:19:34.290 --> 01:19:35.395 align:middle line:90% So let me pause there. 01:19:35.395 --> 01:19:36.770 align:middle line:84% I'm sorry again for running long. 01:19:36.770 --> 01:19:40.030 align:middle line:84% I'd be glad to stay longer and chat if people would like. 01:19:40.030 --> 01:19:41.440 align:middle line:90% Any other questions? 01:19:41.440 --> 01:19:58.950 align:middle line:90% 01:19:58.950 --> 01:20:02.800 align:middle line:84% So if there are no questions, I see 01:20:02.800 --> 01:20:05.673 align:middle line:84% Jade has helpfully shared a link to a chapter I'd 01:20:05.673 --> 01:20:07.840 align:middle line:84% written that Peter Fisher shared with our department 01:20:07.840 --> 01:20:08.465 align:middle line:90% back in August. 01:20:08.465 --> 01:20:09.700 align:middle line:90% I'd be happy to share more. 01:20:09.700 --> 01:20:14.650 align:middle line:84% I wrote a lot about those reports on the Soviet training. 01:20:14.650 --> 01:20:16.780 align:middle line:84% And if that's of interest, I can share that too. 01:20:16.780 --> 01:20:18.613 align:middle line:84% Fisher asked, was there any renewed interest 01:20:18.613 --> 01:20:20.200 align:middle line:90% in experimental physics? 01:20:20.200 --> 01:20:20.710 align:middle line:90% Yes. 01:20:20.710 --> 01:20:22.790 align:middle line:90% So it's actually this period. 01:20:22.790 --> 01:20:23.800 align:middle line:90% Very good question. 01:20:23.800 --> 01:20:26.260 align:middle line:84% It's this period in the United States 01:20:26.260 --> 01:20:28.150 align:middle line:84% that theoretical physics really begins 01:20:28.150 --> 01:20:31.240 align:middle line:84% to break off into its own subfield, 01:20:31.240 --> 01:20:32.860 align:middle line:84% considerably later than we'd seen 01:20:32.860 --> 01:20:37.420 align:middle line:84% it happen in other parts of especially in Europe. 01:20:37.420 --> 01:20:39.970 align:middle line:84% Nonetheless, it was still a kind of predominant assumption 01:20:39.970 --> 01:20:42.280 align:middle line:84% during this time period that physics 01:20:42.280 --> 01:20:45.220 align:middle line:84% meant experimental physics, like we saw much earlier, 01:20:45.220 --> 01:20:47.530 align:middle line:84% and that maybe there should be a role for theory. 01:20:47.530 --> 01:20:49.120 align:middle line:84% The theorists were often considered 01:20:49.120 --> 01:20:50.510 align:middle line:90% so called house theorists. 01:20:50.510 --> 01:20:52.390 align:middle line:84% So you do theoretical physics by being 01:20:52.390 --> 01:20:55.150 align:middle line:84% kind of a closely coupled consultant 01:20:55.150 --> 01:20:57.760 align:middle line:84% to your immediate local experimental group. 01:20:57.760 --> 01:21:00.490 align:middle line:84% And that kind of shifts and gets renegotiated 01:21:00.490 --> 01:21:02.810 align:middle line:90% over this time period. 01:21:02.810 --> 01:21:05.600 align:middle line:84% Another example I cut for time but I 01:21:05.600 --> 01:21:07.410 align:middle line:90% think it speaks to this point. 01:21:07.410 --> 01:21:11.060 align:middle line:84% I found advice letters from Berkeley physicists 01:21:11.060 --> 01:21:13.880 align:middle line:84% to people who wanted to enter the field during this kind 01:21:13.880 --> 01:21:15.410 align:middle line:90% of heyday in the '50s. 01:21:15.410 --> 01:21:19.490 align:middle line:84% And in one letter, a presumably very well intentioned Berkeley 01:21:19.490 --> 01:21:21.110 align:middle line:84% physicist wrote back to a student. 01:21:21.110 --> 01:21:22.730 align:middle line:84% The student explained that he was 01:21:22.730 --> 01:21:24.980 align:middle line:84% in a wheelchair permanently, had some reason to be 01:21:24.980 --> 01:21:26.900 align:middle line:90% in a wheelchair permanently. 01:21:26.900 --> 01:21:30.560 align:middle line:84% And the physicist said, you can't have a career in physics, 01:21:30.560 --> 01:21:32.560 align:middle line:84% because he'd never heard of Stephen Hawking, who 01:21:32.560 --> 01:21:34.450 align:middle line:84% hadn't become prominent yet and hadn't been in a wheelchair 01:21:34.450 --> 01:21:34.950 align:middle line:90% yet. 01:21:34.950 --> 01:21:36.880 align:middle line:84% But also because the presumption was still 01:21:36.880 --> 01:21:38.500 align:middle line:84% physics meant experimental physics, 01:21:38.500 --> 01:21:42.100 align:middle line:84% which meant getting around these factories like at Berkeley 01:21:42.100 --> 01:21:43.065 align:middle line:90% like the bevatron. 01:21:43.065 --> 01:21:44.440 align:middle line:84% I mean, it was a kind of collapse 01:21:44.440 --> 01:21:47.980 align:middle line:84% of who's legitimate to even consider a role for themselves 01:21:47.980 --> 01:21:51.100 align:middle line:84% in physics, which is assumption both about we 01:21:51.100 --> 01:21:52.570 align:middle line:90% might now call it ableism. 01:21:52.570 --> 01:21:54.880 align:middle line:84% There was a clear kind of bias against people 01:21:54.880 --> 01:21:58.180 align:middle line:84% with a non-standard physical situation. 01:21:58.180 --> 01:22:00.880 align:middle line:84% But also I mean, that came coupled 01:22:00.880 --> 01:22:02.893 align:middle line:84% with in this person's mind the sense 01:22:02.893 --> 01:22:04.810 align:middle line:84% that physics equals experimental physics which 01:22:04.810 --> 01:22:07.870 align:middle line:84% equals somehow lumbering around kind 01:22:07.870 --> 01:22:10.060 align:middle line:84% of large equipment like in a factory. 01:22:10.060 --> 01:22:13.890 align:middle line:84% So again, that's one data point, but I think it's illustrative 01:22:13.890 --> 01:22:16.720 align:middle line:84% of this kind of collapse in many physicists' minds 01:22:16.720 --> 01:22:20.238 align:middle line:84% at the time about what a proper role, a proper career 01:22:20.238 --> 01:22:21.280 align:middle line:90% in physics would be like. 01:22:21.280 --> 01:22:22.300 align:middle line:90% And of course, that changes. 01:22:22.300 --> 01:22:24.830 align:middle line:84% That changed over time, both about the kind of demographics, 01:22:24.830 --> 01:22:28.000 align:middle line:84% but also about theory as an autonomous thing. 01:22:28.000 --> 01:22:29.590 align:middle line:84% MIT Center for Theoretical Physics 01:22:29.590 --> 01:22:32.630 align:middle line:84% was among the earliest founded as a standalone center 01:22:32.630 --> 01:22:33.440 align:middle line:90% for theory. 01:22:33.440 --> 01:22:36.830 align:middle line:84% And it was founded in 1967 or '68, I can't remember which. 01:22:36.830 --> 01:22:38.300 align:middle line:90% Maybe Julian might remember. 01:22:38.300 --> 01:22:40.250 align:middle line:90% But late '60s. 01:22:40.250 --> 01:22:42.870 align:middle line:84% So that's a kind of marker point for when this was seen as, 01:22:42.870 --> 01:22:44.250 align:middle line:90% oh, this is a separate thing. 01:22:44.250 --> 01:22:46.920 align:middle line:84% It needs its own space on campus. 01:22:46.920 --> 01:22:48.950 align:middle line:84% So anyway, so that's a great question. 01:22:48.950 --> 01:22:50.240 align:middle line:90% OK, I've gone for a long time. 01:22:50.240 --> 01:22:51.830 align:middle line:90% Sorry to keep you all long. 01:22:51.830 --> 01:22:52.490 align:middle line:90% Stay well. 01:22:52.490 --> 01:22:53.600 align:middle line:90% Hang in there. 01:22:53.600 --> 01:22:56.220 align:middle line:90% And I'll see you all on Monday. 01:22:56.220 --> 01:22:57.880 align:middle line:90% Stay well. 01:22:57.880 --> 01:23:15.000 align:middle line:90%