Interacting Fields: Analogy and Knowledge Transfer in Postwar Physics

Speaker: Christian Joas, Director of the Niels Bohr Archive

Abstract

After World War II, physics grew bigger and new subdisciplines emerged. Methods and terminologies of solid-state, nuclear, and particle physicists began to diverge. Despite this diversification, the unity of physics as a discipline was rarely questioned by the actors. In my talk—which is intended as a work-in-progress report on what eventually should result in a book on the topic—I study this inner tension in postwar physics by examining the history of quantum many-body physics during the 1950s. The field was a key arena for knowledge transfer in physics, as it centered not around a shared object of study, but around a shared set of methods. It thus enabled knowledge transfer between subdisciplines, often through the establishment of analogies between models of otherwise quite disparate physical phenomena. I present selected case studies of processes of knowledge transfer within physics and discuss how they affected the postwar practices of physicists in solid-state, nuclear, and later even particle physics.