Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th Century

Paper 3

Due date: Wednesday of Week 15

Length: 10–12 double-spaced pages. You should use standard margins (1-inch to 1.25-inches on each side of the page) and a 12-point font.

Grade: Your grade on Paper 3 will contribute 35% of your final course grade.

Instructions

For this assignment, you will be writing a 10–12 page paper that advances your own specific, historical argument and supports it by citing primary and secondary sources. You should place a priority on clear expression, and write for an intelligent audience that has not necessarily read the sources in question. Your paper should include a clearly stated and focused thesis, and it should support that thesis using properly cited primary and secondary sources. Your paper must draw on at least two primary sources and at least four secondary sources. You may choose to write about either of the two topics listed below.

• Option A: Physics and Politics in the United States after World War II       
  Did the relationship between physics and politics in the US change after the war? If so, how, why, and over what time period? Did the changes affect only certain physicists, or the field of physics more generally?
• Option B: German Physicists and Nuclear Weapons Research During World War II       
  Did German physicists’ attitudes toward the nuclear program differ from one another? Did their engagement with nuclear weapons change over the course of the war? If so, how, why, and over what time period? How did they characterize their work during and after the war?

A good way to craft a historical argument is to frame it as the answer to a specific question. Consider the difference between these two candidate thesis statements: (a) “The French Revolution was a time of important changes in society.” (b) “Though often described as a radical departure from previous social and political conditions, the French Revolution ultimately had more in common with the Ancien Régime than with modern democratic societies.” The first example would likely be followed by summaries of information. The example presents a specific argument that requires documentation and defense in the body of the paper.

For each paper topic, we have compiled a list of references and made them available on the course website. You are not required to restrict yourself to these sources; however, you are strongly encouraged to talk with Prof. Kaiser and/or your teaching assistant to help you identify additional sources that might be of interest. Likewise, if you prefer to write about a different topic, you must discuss your topic ahead of time with us, so that we can help you identify good sources to use.

Making Good Use of Sources:

A “primary source” is any text written by a physicist or other historical figure at the relevant historical moment. For example, the 1949 report by the General Advisory Committee (GAC) to the Atomic Energy Commission is a primary source; the article analyzing the GAC report by historians Peter Galison and Bart Bernstein (“‘In any light’…”) is a secondary source.

The goal of this paper is not to summarize what other historians have said about the topic. Instead, you should use those historians’ writings to help you craft your own argument. In a historical paper, primary and secondary sources play different roles. The best historical arguments are ones that are shaped by careful reading and interpretation of the primary sources and by paying attention to what other historians have said about these primary sources and their contexts in secondary sources. Primary sources should be analyzed and interpreted, whereas secondary sources should be referenced to provide background information, or their arguments can be built upon or questioned in your paper.

How to Get Started:

• First, you should do a close reading of your primary sources. What is the meaning of the source? Who wrote it, when and where was it written? Are there obvious ways that the text has been shaped by its social, cultural, intellectual, institutional, or political context? What is taken for granted by the author? What remains ambiguous or unclear at the end of your reading? What do the authors assume about their readership?
• Next you should read your secondary sources to determine how scholars have interpreted the events in question and to identify relevant themes or sources. Have historians understood these primary sources in the same way that you do? How do they position these sources in the flow of history? What points have been particularly interesting, contentious, or murky? What is your own interpretation about the events in question and how does it fit with theirs?
• As you are reading and rereading your sources, take detailed notes. You will need to know where you found a particularly interesting quotation or idea so that you can cite the source properly. Proper footnote and bibliography citations are required.
• When you start to compose your paper, think carefully about its structure and organization. Do you have an introductory paragraph that sets up the problem, clearly states your thesis, and outlines your ensuing discussion? Do each of the points that you raise in the body of your paper support your thesis in a clear and compelling way? Do you have a concluding paragraph that wraps up your argument and gestures at its wider significance? Is your writing concise, precise, and explicit? Is it lively?

Sources for Option A: Physics and Politics in the United States after World War II

Did the relationship between physics and politics in the US change after the war? If so, how, why, and over what time period? Did the changes affect only certain physicists, or the field of physics more generally?

Examples of primary sources:

1. “The GAC report of October 30, 1949,” reprinted in Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989 [1976]), pp. 153–162. 
2. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Soviet Atomic Espionage (Washington, DC: Government Printing  Office, 1951), 1–37. 
3. Excerpts from FBI file on J. Robert Oppenheimer. 
4. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing, edited by Richard Polenberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 94–111.

Examples of secondary sources:

1. Bart Bernstein, “‘In the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer,’” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 12 (1982): 195–252. 
2. Paul Forman, “Behind quantum electronics: National security as basis for physical research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987): 149–229. 
3. Peter Galison and Barton Bernstein, “‘In any light’: Scientists and the decision to build the hydrogen bomb,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 19 (1989): 267–347. 
4. Jessica Wang, “Science, security, and the cold war: The case of E. U. Condon,” Isis 83 (1992): 238–69. 
5. David Kaiser, “The atomic secret in red hands? American suspicions of theoretical physicists during the early Cold War,” Representations 90 (2005): 28–60. 
6. Olival Freire, “Science and exile: David Bohm, the Cold War, and a new interpretation of quantum mechanics,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 36 (2005): 1–34. 
7. David Kaiser, “The physics of spin: Sputnik politics and American physicists in the 1950s,” Social Research 73 (2006): 1225–1252.

Sources for Option B: German Physicists and Nuclear Weapons Research During World War II.

Did German physicists’ attitudes toward the nuclear program differ from one another? Did their engagement with nuclear weapons change over the course of the war? If so, how, why, and over what time period? How did they characterize their work during and after the war?

Examples of primary sources:

1. Selections from Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources, edited by Klaus and Ann Hentschel (Boston: Birkhauser, 1996), pp. 332–406. [This contains several separate primary sources; you need not draw on all of the sources included here.] 
2. Farm Hall Transcripts, edited by Charles Frank (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 70–91. 
3. Documents regarding the 1941 meeting in Copenhagen between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
4. Werner Heisenberg, “Research in Germany on the technical application of atomic energy,” Nature 160   
   (1947): 211–215.

Examples of secondary sources:

1. Thomas Powers, Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), pp. 110–52, plus endnotes on pp. 506–16. 
2. Mark Walker, Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb (New York: Plenum, 1995), pp. 183–268, plus endnotes on pp. 301–16. 
3. David Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1992), pp. 417–446, plus endnotes on pp. 621–6. 
4. Cathryn Carson, Particle Physics and Cultural Politics: Werner Heisenberg and the Shaping of a Role for the Physicist in Postwar West Germany (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1995), pp. 250–334. 
5. Rainer Karlsch and Mark Walker, “New light on Hitler’s bomb,” Physics World 18, no. 6 (2005): 15–18.