The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America

"It’s a history book—by a physicist who shifted to doing history. It goes from the early 19th century up to the present (when it was published). It covers how the world wars, especially World War One, affected scientific research and looks at why the centre, especially of experimental physics, shifted to the United States. The book traces all the different threads—social, political, and, of course, scientific—of how physics went from being an outré subject in the 19th century, with only a few fairly eccentric people doing it, to people like James Maxwell, who were really getting into the nuts and bolts of things. Then, in the 20th century, it started getting a lot of support from people like Rockefeller, who were funding research. Now, of course, scientific research is largely funded by governments—the National Science Foundation, and so forth. But 100 years ago, the government was not involved at all in it. There was actually a lot of controversy about whether the government should be involved in funding scientific research. The book traces that but also just the whole social phenomena that were going on. It’s very engagingly written, it’s very entertaining. You would think it would be a fairly dry book, it could even be an academic book, but it’s not at all, it’s very readable. I learned a lot from it that I did not know before, about the background of physics in America. And just science in America too."