When Physics Became King (review)
- When Physics Became King
Morus' When Physics Became King undertakes the seemingly impossible task of demonstrating the vital importance of a cultural history of physics for an understanding of the nineteenth century. By focusing mainly on Britain, with brief interludes in France and the German states, Morus assembles principal findings of the last two decades of cultural history to argue effectively for the contingency of physics as the apex of the sciences, as well as to show how physics (and, presumably, any other science or form of cultural life) necessarily drew on its local resources to acquire features that still shape it today. His history is engagingly written, well illustrated, and entirely accessible to the technically uninitiated (that is, free of equations and unexplained scientific content).
When Physics Became King is "unashamedly cultural history" (4), drawing heavily from the scholarship and methodology of various historians of science from the University of Cambridge during the 1980s and 1990s, mostly as students of Simon Schaffer. The book is openly indebted to their cumulative research, which in itself reflects the interdisciplinary attentions of recent history of science. In particular, great attention is paid to cultures of display, evidence from material artifacts and literature, popular culture, and anthropology, to craft a clear narrative about the change of "natural philosophy" into "physics" by the century's end, and to grant it intellectual primacy.
Morus begins his narrative with mathematics and the institutional transformations that accompanied the French Revolution, tracing how that culture of sophisticated mathematical analysis was imported, institutionalized, and propagated in Britain, primarily at Cambridge. He then turns to the central philosophical innovation of the early nineteenth [End Page 95] century, German Romanticism's attention to the unification of nature, which he follows through the concepts of energy and the luminiferous ether, the two chief conceptual tools of nineteenth-century physics. Those tools were deployed in a culture that was highly charged with showmanship, entrepreneurialism, and exhibition—the subject of Morus' earlier work, slightly overemphasized in this one (Chapter 4)— to become a steam-powered electrical empire that characterized Great Britain by 1900. Supplemented by informative but brief chapters on factory-scale astronomy and the proliferation of laboratories and cultures of precision measurement, Morus concludes with the collapse of the nineteenth-century world picture and the advent of Albert Einstein's relativity and the fracturing of networked Western European institutions during the debacle of World War I. What rises mostly intact from the rubble of 1918 is the primary place physics had forged as a profession, a discipline, and a system of knowledge.
This book provides an exemplary introduction not only to the history of Victorian physics but also to contemporary trends in the history of science, helpfully supplemented by a bibliographical essay for the uninitiated. Unfortunately, much of Europe outside of England and Scotland emerges shortchanged. Yet Morus offers a painless guide to some of the more intriguing interdisciplinary historical findings of recent decades, and a potential new synthesis that he notes has been lacking in the proliferation of microhistorical monographs (6).
