Pragmatism in Particle Physics: Scientific and Military Interests in the Post-war United States

Abstract

Developments in elementary-particle theory in the post-World War II era point to a novel instance of the Forman thesis, with an ironic twist. In his well-known paper on ‘Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory, 1918–1927’, Forman argued that the admission of acausality and indeterminism into theoretical physics — a key step in the formulation of modern quantum mechanics — could be related to Germany’s defeat in World War I. The intervening variable was the hostile, anti-scientific and anti-deterministic intellectual milieu which grew up in the Weimar Republic, and to which German theorists accommodated themselves. The distinctive, and disturbing, aspect of Forman’s argument was that in the formulation of quantum mechanics gross and profane worldly events — namely, a military defeat and its social repercussions — somehow inserted themselves into the sacred texts of theoretical physics, albeit in highly encoded form.1