ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rethinking Personality in the History of Science: The Case of Quantum Orthodoxy

• In Event: Do Individuals Matter? Character, Community, and Controversy in the History of Science

English Abstract

Much of the discussion of the “scientific persona” over the past thirty years has focused on the formation of an “ideal type” and the process of self-fashioning, by means of which scientists forge a cultural identity. Far less attention, however, has been devoted to the ways in which individual personality—understood here as patterns of behaviour specific to the individual scientist—shapes the scientific enterprise. This paper argues that closer attention to personality and its interplay with social norms, institutional settings, and structures of power and status can yield new insight into how individuals exert influence, mobilize support for particular views, resist dominant trends, and conversely, how they become marginalized. To develop this claim, I examine the role of personality in the emergence of the new orthodoxy in quantum mechanics after 1927. I suggest that the rapid ascendancy of what is commonly known today as the “Copenhagen interpretation” cannot be explained solely as a consequence of Niels Bohr’s intellectual victory over Albert Einstein at the fifth Solvay Conference. It also stemmed from their markedly different working styles and dispositions to social interaction. Although Einstein and Schrödinger remained outspoken critics of the new theory, they showed little interest in cultivating collaborative research cultures, supervising doctoral students, or joining forces with fellow quantum dissidents. Bohr, by contrast, exerted an enormous influence on physicists in the 1930s through sustained personal engagement, mentorship, and his ability to attract scores of young researchers to Copenhagen on postdoctoral fellowships. Attending to this often-neglected dimension of scientific personality, I argue, allows us to see more clearly how individuals matter in shaping scientific developments—without reverting to a narrative of “great men.”

Author

• Kristian Camilleri, University of Melbourne