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  • Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics
  • David Kaiser
Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics. By Andrew Warwick (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003) 572 pp. $85.00 cloth $29.00 paper

Warwick has written a new kind of history of mathematical physics. In Masters of Theory, mathematical physics has less to do with the cerebral insights of lone geniuses than with building and maintaining a communally shared body of skills. Historians and sociologists have long scrutinized the social, cultural, and material cultures of experimental sciences. Warwick demonstrates that even pencil-and-paper sciences are dependent upon social and institutional conditions. Most important of all, in Warwick's analysis, are pedagogical conditions: How do you create and perpetuate a community of highly skilled practitioners who do highly esoteric research? His study highlights these questions by looking in depth at Britain's University of Cambridge, one of the key institutions for mathematical physics during the "long" nineteenth century.

The first half of Warwick's book provides a richly textured cultural history of Cambridge life, focusing on the dramatic transformations in the university's pedagogical apparatus between 1770 and 1880. The most important change came in the early nineteenth century, when paper-based examinations replaced a culture of Latin oral disputations and catechetical lectures on authoritative texts. Central to this development became the Mathematical Tripos, a grueling nine-day written examination that capped students' undergraduate studies. The Tripos triggered further changes. Students hired private coaches who gave lectures to ten or so fee-paying students at a time, setting progressively difficult problems for them to master.

In order to survive under the demanding system, which featured as many as ten hours per day of intense mathematical work among the [End Page 644] most competitive students, Cambridge undergraduates took up competitive sports such as rowing. "Disciplined bodies" became the obvious counterpoint to "disciplined minds."

These site-specific pedagogical developments fostered a rich store of tacit knowledge among the Cambridge community. Textbooks written by and for Cambridge students seemed alien to readers outside the system, assuming as they did the specifically Cantabridgean system of training and problem solving. The coaching system—and its attendant skill set—spread beyond the university (beginning in the 1860s) only when former students took teaching jobs in large numbers in other universities and secondary schools throughout Britain and the empire.

The second half of Warwick's book examines how this pedagogical regime functioned as a conservative system, especially with regard to new developments in physical theory by the likes of James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein, c. 1870 to 1920. In this context, Warwick displays his greatest methodological divergence from traditional histories of physics and mathematics by drawing on reader-response approaches from literary theory. If texts alone do not carry their own meanings, then why and how do various scientific texts make sense to people in specific times and places? Cambridge coaches and their students appropriated new scientific materials from their specific vantagepoints, reading Maxwell's and Einstein's work piecemeal and picking out what mattered most in Cambridge, if not elsewhere. Particular problem-solving techniques could be incorporated into the long-standing pedagogical apparatus; other material was passed over lightly or ignored altogether. New work was "normalized" by reducing it to Tripos problems, independent of the scientific authors' own intentions or interpretations.

Warwick's 500-page history is redolent with insights into one major institution over the longue durée. He has chosen one side of an inevitable compromise, describing one place in evocative detail over a long period of time, while affording few sustained glances at other places. To pursue such themes as the skills entailed by the theoretical sciences and their dependence upon specific pedagogical institutions, a study of more places over shorter time periods would be useful as well. By placing pedagogy, skills, and locally honed practices squarely in view, Warwick's Masters of Theory provides the gold standard by which such later efforts should be measured.

David Kaiser
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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