ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The liquidation of Solid State Physics

• In Event: How Sciences End 2

English Abstract

By the 1960s, solid-state physics (SSP), a brand-new subdiscipline in the 1940s, was far and away the largest division of the American physics community. It enjoyed similar prominence globally. Covering the thermal, optical, acoustical, mechanical, electromagnetic, and quantum properties of solids (and sometimes also gasses and liquids), SSP grouped together a diverse range of research programmes. It became a wildly successful subdiscipline, supporting both industrial and academic physicists and promoting productive exchange between them.

Within a half century, however, the topical patchwork that made up SSP had begun to fray. Even as SSP achieved its greatest prominence, some rebelled against the way it carved up the field, migrating instead to ‘condensed-matter physics’ or ‘materials science’. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, ‘solid state’ was in retreat. Its material and intellectual resources were redistributed among condensed-matter physics and materials science—along with an array of new fields like soft matter physics, complex fluids, nanoscience, and active matter—that addressed topics, employed methods, and probed phenomena previously claimed by the solid-state synthesis. Contemporaries began to remark upon its disappearance.

This case study investigates how SSP was dislodged from its strong institutional position: how journals were rebranded, chairs renamed, curricula modified, to clear space for new ways of organising the physical sciences. It thinks through an example of how sciences end within larger disciplinary structures, showing how and end need not imply delegitimization. It thus both broadens our understanding of endings in science and maps out areas of commonality between different types of ending processes.

Author

• Joseph D. Martin, Durham University