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Re: historical physics



Historians of science are helping physicists move beyond the
historical myths we normally tell our students. (This is not a slam
at myths--they are important in the development of any community--
policital or scientific.)

Let me recommend two books by Allan Franklin, "Experiment, Right or
Wrong" and "The Neglect of Experiment" (both Cambridge Univ. Press).
The former concentrates on the development of the theory of weak
interactions and includes recent atomic parity-violation experiments.
The latter concentrates on the discovery (and non-discovery) of
parity and CP nonconservation and includes Franklin's paper on
Millikan's oil drop experiment. Both have excellent discussions on
experimentation.

Another excellent book is Peter Galison's "How Experiments End"
(Univ. of Chicago Press). Galison has chapters on the magnetic
moment of the electron (including Einstein's experiment and others
that gave the wrong result), cosmic rays (including Millikan's "Birth
Cry of Atoms" proposals), and neutral weak currents. Again, there
are wonderful sections on experimentation, including the culture of
experimeters, both individual and those who work in large groups.

Of course, the work of Holton, especially on Einstein and relativity,
should not be overlooked.

There is nothing more revealing to today's students than to look at
copies of Millikan's laboratory notebooks, see the evidence that he
used logs to do arithmetic, and come to the realization that data
reduction used to be very painful before calculators.