Physics as a Human Endeavor

Abstract

Physics is clearly “a human endeavor” in that it is pursued by people with a rich diversity of backgrounds differently enmeshed in social and cultural contexts, and engaged also with a rich range of ideological, political, economic and religious commitments. Yet as Simone Hyater-Adams and colleagues observe in their recent studies of Black physicists’ identity (2018; 2019), it also has a “culture of no culture’”ideology that would deny the pertinence of such commitments or the relevance of ethnicity to the study of physics. At the root of many barriers to the participation of Black physicists, they argue, lies “a pervasive belief that physics is objective and hence not biased,” which in turn makes it difficult to advocate physics to people who have been excluded or marginaliZed both in society and more specifically in the physics field (Hyater-Adams et al., 2019, p. 1). They ask how pedagogical and institutional norms in physics might render the subject more inclusive and physics identities more encompassing. Together with similar studies addressing gender and/or ethnicity both generally and in regard to specific groups, this is one of the most common respects in which physicists currently work to deepen the humanity of their discipline. Analysing what physics education research over the last 15 years reveals about such conscious pressure points on inclusivity and identity provides the first lens through which this chapter investigates the extent to which physics can be thought of as a “human” endeavor. Historical and anthropological studies can help us investigate less conscious limitations to current educational aims both by disclosing the ways that the humanity of physics has been tested in the past, especially by war, and by indicating ways it might be stretched in the future, particularly by climate change. A study of Sharon Traweek's (1988) cross-cultural anthropology of education and research in high energy physics in the 1970s and David Kaiser's (1998, 2002, 2006b, 2005c) examinations of cold-war pedagogies will allow me to show how the legacies of twentieth century warfare and political ideologies were transmuted in the educational strategies of American physicists, and provide a basis for assessing the extent to which educational research now has surmounted those problematics. Understanding and addressing climate change relies on atmospheric physics, ocean circulations and cloud dynamics, and raises more widely distributed social, technical and economic challenges than high-energy physics, quantum devices or materials science. Asking how physics education might meet future needs in this regard will provide a further means of establishing limits to our current understanding of physics as a human endeavor, and suggesting new goals.