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By the way, what I have just outlined is what I call a "physicist's history of physics," which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development, which I do not really know!
Brian Switek has been taking on the unenviable task of pointing out when his professors are indulging in "scientist's history of science": attributing discoveries to the wrong person, oversimplifying the development of an idea, retelling anecdotes which are more amusing than true, and generally chewing on the textbook cardboard. For his pains, the responses he's been getting typically resemble the remark, "That's interesting, but I'm still right."
Now, he's a palaeontology person, and I'm a physics boffin, so you'd think I could get away with pretending that we don't have that problem in this Department, but I started this note by quoting Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1986), so that's not really a pretence worth keeping up. When it comes to formal education, I only have systematic experience with one field; oh, I took classes in pure mathematics and neuroscience and environmental politics and literature and film studies, but I won't presume to speak in depth about how those subjects are taught.
Lately, I've been wondering whether physics in fact has it worse than other subjects. I don't have the data to answer that question, but I can at least sketch what I suspect to be a contributing factor which other sciences might encounter to a lesser extent or in a different way.
Suppose I want to teach a classful of college sophomores the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. There's a standard "physicist's history" which goes along with this, which touches on a familiar litany of famous names: Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Schrödinger. The problem is that all of these men were highly trained, professional physicists who were thoroughly conversant with the knowledge of their time — well, naturally! But this means that any one of them knew more classical physics than a modern college sophomore. They would have known Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics, for example, in addition to techniques of statistical physics (calculating entropy and such). Unless you know what they knew, you can't really follow their thought processes, and we don't teach big chunks of what they knew until after we've tried to teach what they figured out! For example, if you don't know thermodynamics and statistical mechanics pretty well, you won't be able to follow why Max Planck proposed the blackbody radiation law he did, which was a key step in the development of quantum theory.
Consequently, any "historical" treatment at the introductory level will probably end up "conventionalized". One has either to step extremely carefully or to throw out the whole benighted historical approach, saving the history for a time when it can actually be appreciated.
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Blake, I suspect "mathematicians' history of mathematics" is at least as unhistorical as is the case for physics, if not moreso, and for similar reasons.
I'm often aware, when I'm giving the brief conventional history of an idea (e.g. the calculus) that at least half of what I'm saying is dead wrong. But it's a useful kind of wrongness, as I read Feynman to be saying in your quote.
Posted by: a little night musing | September 11, 2008 3:21 PM
Biology is much the same way, we try to teach what Darwin, Schleiden, Ernst Mayr, Dobzhansky, von Humboldt, Hooke, Linneaus, Leclerc, and others (out of order, I know, but that's the order I remembered them) figured out, but not what they were taught and WHY they figured it out. We also leave out individuals which contributed, but their contributions have been surpassed greatly by modern biology. Hugo de Vries comes to mind here.
Anyway, thanks for bringing this up, it is certainly needed.
Posted by: Jared | September 11, 2008 5:30 PM
Stigler was a statistician.
And yes, when statisticians teach statistics, a lot of what they teach students about the history of their subject (as an example, why statistical tables came to be at the 5 percent and 1 percent size), a lot of it wasn't particularly true. But I suspect they believe what they were saying because that's what their own professors told them.
But it's worse - a lot of the "history" in statistical papers is also wrong. Hundreds of papers, maybe thousands, refer to Fisher's "famous" 1924 paper (and they almost all say much the same things about it) but sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person to have actually read the Fisher paper, because it mostly doesn't say what the papers say it says. And that happens rather a lot.
When you're trying to convey concepts, the relevant part of the history of science (and mathematics) is, to a large extent what gets the message across. Further, people in the sciences aren't generally historians so they're often relying on what others tell them. A convenient tale about where something came from may actually convey more science than a true one, even assuming the person telling the tale iknew the full truth. Funny stories might help the ideas stick, or maybe they just liven up a lecture.
Even our most celebrated explanations are like this. Sagan certainly abused history (probably unwittingly) more than once, retelling stories that mixed truth and ... well, legend, putting it kindly. Truth is messy and doesn't fit well in a short lecture, or a five minute piece to camera.
That said, I think we could get away with much better approximations to the truth and still convey the message.
Posted by: efrique | September 11, 2008 7:20 PM
Hmm. "was" isn't the right word for Stigler there, since of course, he's still around, and isn't even retired yet, last I heard.
So he is a statistician but saying "is" doesn't convey the right tense when I'm referring to his area when he made an observation about 30 years ago. I guess (in the absence of a suitable tense that covers a fact that remains true but whose relevance in the present discussion is entirely past tense) that the sentence should be recast into some uglier form.
Posted by: efrique | September 11, 2008 7:35 PM
In pure mathematics we have Arnold's principle: if a theorem is named after so-and-so, then the one thing you can be sure of is that so-and-so had nothing to do with it.
Note that Arnold's principle applies to itself.
Posted by: William | September 11, 2008 7:46 PM
Stories keep people from sleeping in class.
It's probably a general component to any academic teachings. The retelling of the "Little Albert" (psychology) studies come to mind for me. I think it has more to do with a pedagogical effect rather than an educational one. It isn't that important to a scientist that the history is entirely accurate, so much as it is important to have some sort of heuristic for remembering ideas. For instance, when someone refers to classical conditioning, I might picture a crying baby or salivating dogs and quickly recall those psych 101 "stories."
Posted by: locklin | September 11, 2008 8:13 PM
Thanks for the link and discussion, Blake.
I reject the idea that we have to perpetuate textbook cardboard stories because it's easy. Are we really that lazy? What frustrates me most is how it is often so easy to correct mistakes or tell more accurate stories (as locklin suggests). That's what I'm trying to achieve with my own writing; the real history is just as exciting (if not moreso) than the "white lies."
Posted by: Laelaps | September 11, 2008 10:31 PM
I'd consider that a special case of the general principle that real life is stranger than what we can make up.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | September 11, 2008 10:34 PM
I've seen a similar yet strangely contrary behavior to this one. Tell me if you've seen it as well.
An equation or other named quantity is being discussed (i.e. Maxwell's Equations). An anecdote is given that the name is not properly attributed (You know, Heaviside did most of the work already). This is both: 1. Pushing against the physicists' history implicit in the system of names, and 2. Completely emblematic of the retelling of that history.
Posted by: Flavin | September 11, 2008 11:34 PM