BOOK REVIEW: Andrew C. Warwick.MASTERS OF THEORY: CAMBRIDGE AND THE RISE OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics Jordi Cat (bio) Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics, by Andrew C. Warwick: pp. xiv + 572. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, $29.00. Victorian science raises its own issues of place and time. Why did mathematical physics rise so powerfully in nineteenth-century Cambridge? What made possible its distinctive technical innovation and development for over a century? Why did this development coincide with the rise of the extended use of pen and paper among students and teachers? How does it relate to the elevation of an ideal of athletic masculinity and the practice of physical exercise and sexual abstinence? Andrew Warwick's insightful and exemplary Masters of Theory pursues these questions and their answers following the premise that even theoretical science is not culturally transcendent, but a phenomenon of its time. For this purpose, he helps himself to lessons from the innovative recent body of scholarship on scientific experimentation—such as Peter Gallison's Image and Logic (1998) and Graeme Gooday's The Morals of Measurement (2004)—and from the less orthodox among twentieth-century philosophers and historians of science, including Michel Foucault, Michael Polanyi, and Thomas Kuhn. Warwick's empirical approach both combats and complements historiographical and philosophical approaches to the subject that tend toward either too-general externalism or too-thin internalism. In the nineteenth-century, the role of Oxford and Cambridge was to train the leaders that would run and defend the growing British Empire. Greek, Latin, and the disciplines of hierarchical service were the relevant ingredients in Oxbridge education; preparation for trade and science was pursued elsewhere. Why, then, did mathematics become central to Cambridge education in this period? Warwick attributes the increasing importance of mathematics in the Cambridge curriculum to a number of external pressures on the university. In the first place, a vogue for Newtonian natural philosophy was retained at Cambridge long after Newton's death, both on account of its Englishness—particularly in the face of G. W. Leibniz's calculus, its intellectual competitor—and in the service of natural theology, as a revelation of divine order. Secondly—as Martin Goldman has also discussed in The Demon in the Aether, his 1984 biography of the Victorian physicist James Clerk Maxwell—the university's chancellor was answerable to Parliament for the maintenance of academic standards and sought to establish control over the independent colleges by setting examination requirements. An increase in the number of students seeking careers in government administration, the church, and the army made competitive mathematical examinations the ideal source of impersonal standards, in part because mathematics was a subject for which it was possible to give written mass examinations. Attention to the puzzle raised by the central role of mathematics in nineteenth- century Cambridge education—which placed British science on the world stage—is important but not novel; what, then, is Warwick's contribution? His book adds to the story two connected levels of analysis and narrative, developing a rich conceptual framework of notions and questions, often linked to philosophical discussions of science and methodological controversies. He is concerned with explaining the origin of theoretical claims, their local meaning, and their transmission and development. The history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cambridge education underpins much of the greatest British physics and the physicists' attitude toward foreign theories, such as Albert Einstein's. The book also adds great detail in the form of an empirical ethnography of student life, its psychological, cognitive, and moral sensibilities and values. It is here that we witness the [End Page 701] complexity of the cultural, material, and institutional circumstances that precede, reinforce, and follow the developments; it is here that, in turn, we get Warwick's specific position in the general debates I have mentioned above. While oral examinations and public lectures had tested and encouraged skills and qualities appropriate to previous generations of bishops, judges, or civil servants, the new use of mathematics in examinations prompted a pedagogical shift that affected the content, methods, skills, and sensibilities of the new students and their subsequent researches. The new written examinations were formulated around problem-solving— both in pure...