ABSTRACT

This chapter shows that one of the best uses of the history of physics is to help teach physics to nonphysicists. Although many of them are very nice people, nonphysicists are rather odd. A historian might describe how in 1911 the Dutch physicist Kamerlingh Onnes was measuring the electrical resistance of a sample of cold mercury and thought that he had found a short circuit. Various problems in physics deal with motion in some sort of space. The history of science is further distinguished from political or artistic history in that the achievements of science become permanent. History plays a special role for elementary particle physicists. Many historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have taken the desire for historicism, the worry about falling into a Whig interpretation of history, to extremes. Most particle physicists think of the standard model as only an effective field theory that provides a low-energy approximation of a more fundamental theory.