For this week's issue, I've asked Greg Good, director of the Center for History of Physics, to offer some insights on Charles Darwin.
Discovering our roots with Darwin
Why should physicists mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's
For this week's issue, I've asked Greg Good, director of the Center for History of Physics, to offer some insights on Charles Darwin.
Discovering our roots with Darwin
Why should physicists mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th of On the Origin of Species? Of course we recognize the critical importance of Darwin's ideas for biology in the last century, but how is this relevant to physics? I submit that this is the wrong question. To my mind, we should instead be asking: Why would one think Darwin is not important to all science? I will answer these questions with a story.
Darwin attended university (Edinburgh for one year, then Cambridge) and struggled, as undergraduates still do, to choose a future occupation. He considered medicine, law, and the clergy, while taking the usual classes of the time in mathematics and classics. Scientific training was not yet specialized into disciplines. He discovered his love of nature in the field, outside of his studies. He collected beetles and plants with bug lovers and botanists. Adam Sedgwick recruited him for geological fieldwork in Wales, likely as much for his broad shoulders as for his aptitude.
Then, as now, however, Darwin discovered his lifework during "graduate school"—in his case, sailing around the world on the HMS Beagle. He devoured the travel writings of Alexander von Humboldt, the physics of John Herschel, and the geology of Charles Lyell. He modeled his questions and his methods on their works. He avidly collected both fossils and living organisms, mapped strata, and formulated theories on mountain building and coral reef formation. He considered ocean currents, climate, and human prehistory. His curiosity knew no boundaries.
Likewise, the impact of Darwin's central idea, natural selection, has known no boundaries. Today its tendrils reach into every science. The journal Nature Physics dedicated its March 2009 issue to Darwin. One article examined On the Origin of Species as a model of careful, clear scientific exposition, which it is. Another applied natural selection to quantum states, and a third pondered why evolution rather than, say, gravity provides the locus of so much social-political-theological controversy.
Yet we know some people deny the validity of radioisotopic dating, of scientific cosmology, or of climate-change research. The new book by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (Basic Books, 2009), underscores the ubiquity not just of scientific illiteracy, but of a deeply antiscientific attitude in the American population. As "science communicators," we must recognize that Darwin and modern physicists are in the same boat. We both rise and fall with the same tide.
Virtual journal series expands coverage
As of August, the AIP- and APS-sponsored series Virtual Journals in Science and Technology (VJ) now includes two more journals—EPL and Physics-Uspekhi—both made available through IOP Publishing. EPL, formerly Europhysics Letters, is published by the EPL Association; Physics-Uspekhi is copublished by Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk and Turpion Ltd. With the addition of these two scholarly journals, there are now four participating publications in the VJ series from IOP Publishing. Overseen by a distinguished group of editors, Virtual Journals in Science and Technology has proven to be a valuable resource for researchers by gathering topically related content from a broad swath of publications from a variety of publishers. First launched by the AIP and APS in 2000 and drawing from 90 scholarly publications from 19 participating publishers, the VJ series now comprises six titles, providing convenient access to the latest papers in atomic quantum fluids, biological physics, nanoscale science, quantum information, superconductivity, and ultrafast science. Learn more about the VJ series—including the newest, the Virtual Journal of Atomic Quantum Fluids—by visiting the VJ gateway.
Funding for education
AIP helped Member Societies and the science community to support a bill that funds the first increase to the Department of Education's Mathematics and Science Partnerships program since 2006. The program works to enhance the content knowledge and teaching skills of K–12 teachers by creating partnerships between high-need school districts and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) faculty at colleges and universities. AIP helped determine a realistic financial goal for the funding increase, and garnered support in Congress through visits and phone calls. Congressmen Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Vern Ehlers (R-MI)—both physicists by training—led the effort to increase the funding for this program by $5 million, as opposed to the slight decrease suggested by the Administration. The bill has been approved by the House of Representatives and is currently under consideration in the Senate.
PT staffers 