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‘The Renaissance of Physics’: Karl K. Darrow (1891–1982) and the Dissemination of Quantum Theory at the Bell Telephone Laboratories

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Part of the book series:History of Mechanism and Machine Science ((HMMS,volume 27))

Abstract

Karl K. Darrow was a central actor in the reception of quantum theory in the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He was the first industrial physicist to dedicate his entire working time to the dissemination of novel concepts and theoretical tools by means of long review papers. The present paper analyzes the evolution of Darrow’s narratives of quantum theory and shows that Darrow’s reviews aimed at substantiating the view that physics was an evolutionary process. The paper argues that this view was connected to Darrow’s peculiar activity at the Bell Labs as well as to the contemporaneous attempts of leading American scientists to build an ideology of national science.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The present paper covers a period from the late 1910s to late 1930s. The AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories were created only in 1925. Before that date, the personnel that would merge into the Bell Telephone Laboratories worked in the Engineering Department of the Western Electric Co., which was one of the member companies of the Bell System. For the sake of brevity, I will use the termBell Labs to refer to all the laboratories of the Bell System during the period under consideration.

  2. 2.

    Unless otherwise reported, the biographical information contained in this section is taken from this interview.

  3. 3.

    This expression was used by the interviewer W. J. King.

  4. 4.

    The list of the topics of the first season clearly shows that the principal aim of the Colloquium was to engage with the development of quantum theory (“Meeting of the Colloquium”).

  5. 5.

    Cartwright1987, p. 425.

  6. 6.

    My interpretation of Darrow’s writings as a quest for the methodological unity of physics is analogous to the analysis philosopher of science Jordi Cat (1998) made of the debate between emergence and reductionism in physics as implicitly referring to two different models of unification.

  7. 7.

    Dempster1926.

  8. 8.

    Historian of science Mara Beller has convincingly argued that the success of Schrödinger’s approach was widespread and not limited to “the conservative quarterlies of the physics community” (Beller1983, p. 470).

  9. 9.

    Van Vleck1929a, p. 485.

  10. 10.

    Darrow’s description shares common elements with the idealized framework the historian of science John Pickstone (2000) has created about the ways in which scientists know nature and make artifacts.

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Acknowledgments

The archival research was supported by a grant-in-aid from the friends of the Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics. I gratefully thank Marie Burks and Max Levis for the English revision of the paper and Cristopher Lehner for the useful discussions on Darrow’s interpretation of wave mechanics. I am also grateful to Peter Galison, Michael Gordin, Gerald Holton and the other participants of the Phunday 2013 workshop where I presented a previous version of the paper. I especially thank David Kaiser, Skúli Sigurdsson and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

    Roberto Lalli

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  1. Roberto Lalli

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Correspondence toRoberto Lalli.

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  1. Department of Physics, Lille 1 University Science and Technology, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

    Raffaele Pisano

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Lalli, R. (2015). ‘The Renaissance of Physics’: Karl K. Darrow (1891–1982) and the Dissemination of Quantum Theory at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. In: Pisano, R. (eds) A Bridge between Conceptual Frameworks. History of Mechanism and Machine Science, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9645-3_14

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