This page contains discussion questions designed to get students thinking about the material, and review questions that help prepare them for the midterm.
What was "classical" about classical physics? Does the term carry meaning beyond a chronological description (that is, for physics that occurred before "modern physics" was born)? Did classical physics have a philosophical or aesthetic style of its own?
What was the role of "worldviews" in fin-de-siècle physics? How were these related to experimental instruments and material artifacts, or to institutions and patterns of training?
What was the relationship between the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's development of relativity?
How did Einstein's work at the patent office shape his approach to physics ca. 1905?
How did physicists other than Einstein pick up and interpret his work on relativity? How did these interpretations depend on individuals' training and institutional context?
Discuss Einstein's philosophical journey from 1905 to 1915, paying particular attention to the changing roles of experiment and mathematics in his theorizing.
How did Max Planck think about his work on blackbody radiation in 1900? In 1912? Why might historians label Planck a "reluctant revolutionary"?
What did Einstein mean by calling his light-quantum hypothesis a "heuristic" description? How did other physicists approach a particulate theory of light?
What role (if any) might generational effects have played in the creation of quantum mechanics? Why did Werner Heisenberg's approach to quantum theory seem so different from Erwin Schrödinger's?
Some historians have argued that broader social forces - such as a turn against causality by leading German humanists after Germany's surprising defeat in World War I - shaped the development of quantum mechanics. Evaluate this claim.
How did the practice of physics change during World War II?
Most of the American and European-émigré physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project cited the perceived threat from Germany's nuclear program as their main motivation for working on nuclear weapons. Why did these scientists keep working on the atomic bomb project even after Germany was defeated in the spring of 1945?
Policymakers in the United States after the war often held differing views on whether physicists should be "on tap" or "on top." What was at stake in these debates? How did they play out against a broader political landscape after the war?
What role did the security hearing of J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1954 play in larger relations between American physicists and the political arena? Did the Oppenheimer hearing spell the end of an era?
The rise of "big science" brought with it a huge shift in the source and scale of funding for academic science, which now came overwhelmingly from military sources. What roles might this new source of patronage have had on the types of research and training that American physicists pursued after World War II? Who was really in charge?
What are some of the ways in which the onset of the Cold War shaped the practice of physics? How did it affect the ways that physicists around the world selected research topics or communicated their findings?
The development of modern physics has often been narrated as a succession of new theories, or even "paradigms." What are some other ways in which scholars might periodize the development of modern physics?
The midterm examination will be held in Session #13, in class. The format will be closed-book and closed-notes, with a variety of types of questions, including some terms to identify and some short answer questions. The exam will be comprised of questions based on some of these topics, and will contribute 25% of your final course grade.
What was the Maxwellians' "mechanical worldview"? What was the 19th century German theorists' "electrodynamic worldview"?
Using a Minkowski diagram, demonstrate the relativity of simultaneity. Similarly, using pictures of a light-clock as seen by observers in different inertial reference frames, derive Albert Einstein's formula for time dilation. What does the time-dilation formula, Δt' = γΔt, mean in words? How does the factor γ depend on the ratio (v/c)?
What is length contraction? How did Hendrik Lorentz describe the effect? What role did the relativity of simultaneity play in Einstein's re-derivation of the effect?
Discuss some of the ways Einstein was and was not proceeding along Machian lines in his 1905 paper on special relativity.
What was the Michelson-Morley experiment? What did it aim to measure? How did physicists such as Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré react to its results? How could its results be explained by special relativity?
How did other physicists, such as Hermann Minkowski and Ebeneezer Cunningham, read and appropriate Einstein's special relativity paper?
What was "general" about Einstein's "general relativity"? What does the equivalence principle imply about accelerated motions and gravitational fields? What were the three "classic" tests of the theory?
What is the photoelectric effect? How did Einstein explain the results? What was the effect of Compton scattering on Einstein's "heuristic" suggestions?
What was Niels Bohr's model of the atom? In what specific ways did the model break with classical physics? How did Louis de Broglie's work relate to Bohr's? How does the de Broglie wavelength vary with an object's mass and velocity? On what scale does such "waviness" become relevant?
Discuss Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. What are some of the different ways in which the principle has been interpreted?
Define Niels Bohr's correspondence principle and complementarity.
Describe the two principles underlying the EPR argument ("reality criterion" and "separability"), and discuss some of the ways Bohr countered this argument.
What was John Bell's result, and why was it significant? What conclusions can be drawn concerning particles' possession of determinate properties?
What is Paul Forman's thesis? What kinds of evidence does he use to defend his position? Discuss some objections to it.