When Physics Became King, by Iwan Rhys Morus

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Reviewed by: When Physics Became King Jordi Cat (bio) When Physics Became King, by Iwan Rhys Morus; pp. xii + 303. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, $60.00, $25.00 paper, £39.99, £16.00 paper. Introductions, surveys, and teachers in the history of physics (and of science more broadly) have increasingly lagged for decades behind scholarly research in the same field. This growing gulf can be traced to shifting positions in pedagogy and historiography: from a more traditional assumption of consistency or even overlap between research and pedagogy to a more recent assumption that the two will diverge or be in conflict. For the overlap school, material presented to students differs from academic research only in degree. For the conflict school, the difference is one of kind; classroom work stands in contrast with jargon-ridden, ideological, and fashionable ideas characteristic of the new scholarship and academic discussions. Both schools, however, tend to prefer what they consider to be safe, time-honored, uncontroversial information. Iwan Morus's When Physics Became King, although it might be seen as of the overlap school, aligns itself with a new kind of science historiography that seeks to bridge the gulf between pedagogy and scholarship in an innovative manner. For this new school, if it is what professional historians write, publish, and debate, it must be worth teaching. The difference is consistently one of explicit aims and implicit standards: teaching the new material and new approaches requires taking them seriously, but not for granted, and presenting them accordingly, free of dogma and drama. Finally, the difference includes the new historiography's critical tools: explicit and self-conscious statements of purpose and method, a broader perspective on what calls for explanation and what counts [End Page 138] as a relevant one, and exposure to updated background literature and to alternative notions. Open-minded readers will find both stimulus and opportunity. When Physics Became King sheds light on the blind spot in previous accounts of nineteenth-century physics and explains what they take for granted: physics' acquisition of preeminence among other scientific disciplines and its rise to a central role in our culture, then and now. To understand the rise of physics, argues Morus, one needs to recognize first that two centuries ago no discipline called physics or practitioners called physicists existed, and second that physics cannot and did not take place—and time—in a vacuum. Scholarship over the last two decades has explained physics' dominance in cultural terms. One can, then, approach the survey of physics more broadly by including the many explanatory dimensions of its practitioners' "real cultural engagement" (3). Science, Morus reminds us, is not a given; it is a multidimensional cultural achievement. This move abandons the isolationist Cartesian and romantic individualisms that have shaped previous accounts, especially in the more widely accessible literature. And when we look at nineteenth-century physics "through the lens of culture" (6), what we see is the conscious mobilization of specific material, intellectual, social, and political resources of the time. For consistency and plausibility's sake, Morus implies that the cultural birth of physics recapitulates the birth of modern Western science. He safely grounds his approach on both principle and precedent, and his comparison does not entirely succeed or fail. But When Physics Became King does subscribe to previous accounts' strong historiographical sense of locality, materiality, and contingency. It also subscribes to a notion of revolution, although it replaces preceding accounts' revolutionary narrative—in terms of the Copernican revolution—with a more explanatory and political counterpart—in terms of the French and American Revolutions. Nineteenth-century physics is more than the culmination of the unifying ambitions of the mechanistic worldview and the transition to the empire of energy. The consolidation of physics as a discipline is inseparable from its theoretical powers and special effects; its work and waste; its Newtonianism and Romanticism; its private emotions and public displays; its notations, units, and nomenclatures; its unifications and specializations; its university examinations and experimental laboratories; its ethereal entities and precise measurements; its national rivalries and international collaborations; and ultimately its service to revolution, theology, empire, and to industry, art, and commerce. It is equally inseparable from...