Science Technology Society

Professor Nisbet is a social scientist who studies strategic communication in policy debates and public affairs. His current work focuses on scientific and environmental controversies, examining the interactions between experts, journalists, and various publics. In this research, Nisbet examines how news coverage reflects and shapes policy, how strategists try to mold public opinion, and how citizens make sense of controversies.

Why? The best explanation I have heard is advanced by the physicist John H Marburger, who is currently science advisor to US President George Bush. By 1930, Marburger points out, physicists had found a perfectly adequate way of representing classical concepts within the quantum framework using Hilbert (infinite-dimensional) space. Quantum systems, he says, “live” in Hilbert space, and the concepts of position and momentum, for instance, are associated with different sets of coordinate axes that do not line up with each other, thereby resulting in the situation captured in ordinary-language terms by complementarity.“It’s a clear, logical and consistent way of framing the complementarity issue,” Marburger explained to me. “It clarifies how quantum phenomena are represented in alternative classical ‘pictures’, and it fits in beautifully with the rest of physics. The clarity of this scheme removes much of the mysticism surrounding complementarity. What happened was like a gestalt-switch, from a struggle to view microscopic nature from a classical point of view to an acceptance of the Hilbert-space picture, from which classical concepts emerged naturally. Bohr brokered that transition.”

In his book Niels Bohr’s Times, the physicist Abraham Pais captures a paradox in his subject’s legacy by quoting three conflicting assessments. Pais cites Max Born, of the first generation of quantum physics, and Werner Heisenberg, of the second, as saying that Bohr had a greater influence on physics and physicists than any other scientist. Yet Pais also reports a distinguished younger colleague asking with puzzlement and scepticism “What did Bohr really do?”.

By their less than wholly objective accounts of the development of physics, historians have conspired to propagate the myth of science as being essentially theoretical physics. Though the myth no longer described scientific reality 50 years ago, historians pretended that all was well, that nothing had changed since the old heroic days of Einstein and his generation.