Program in Science, Technology & Society
and Department of Physics
Program in Science, Technology & Society
and Department of Physics
Short Biography
David Kaiser is an associate professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and a lecturer in MIT's Department of Physics. He completed an A.B. in physics (1993) at Dartmouth College, and Ph.D.s in physics (1997) and the history of science (2000) at Harvard University. Kaiser's historical research focuses on the development of physics in the United States during the Cold War, looking at how the discipline has evolved at the intersection of politics, culture, and the changing shape of higher education. His physics research focuses on early-universe cosmology, working at the interface of particle physics and gravitation.
Kaiser is author of the award-winning Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (University of Chicago Press, 2005), which traces how Richard Feynman's idiosyncratic approach to quantum physics entered the mainstream. He has also edited several books on the history of modern physical sciences, including, most recently, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (MIT Press, 2005). He is currently completing a book entitled American Physics and the Cold War Bubble (University of Chicago Press, in preparation).
Kaiser's work has been featured in such magazines as Harper's, Science, and Scientific American, on National Public Radio and NOVA television programs, and in specialist journals in physics and history. Honors include awards for best book in the field from the History of Science Society (2007) and the Forum for the History of Science in America (2006); the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award for distinguished tenure-track faculty member at MIT (2006); the Leroy Apker Award for best undergraduate physics student from the American Physical Society (1993); and several teaching awards from Harvard and MIT.
Download Kaiser's c.v.
Research Interests: History of Science
My historical research focuses on the development of physics in the United States after World War II, looking in particular at how the postwar generation of graduate students was trained. My first book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (University of Chicago Press, 2005), traces how the American physicist Richard Feynman's idiosyncratic approach to quantum physics entered the mainstream. Ubiquitous today throughout nearly every branch of modern physics, the diagrams did not become a part of the physicists' toolkit overnight. Feynman introduced his line-drawings in the late 1940s to help him navigate the notorious algebraic thickets that arose when trying to combine quantum mechanics with special relativity. The diagrams were a personal form of shorthand: mnemonic aids to make sure that various terms in the long calculations were not omitted, repeated, or otherwise jumbled.
Though Feynman and close associates, such as Freeman Dyson, published detailed articles on how to use the diagrams, virtually no physicists learned to use the new tool from texts alone. Personal mentoring and extended face-to-face contact proved crucial for putting the diagrams into circulation. Local schools emerged, moreover, as mentors and students forged distinct interpretations and applications for the new diagrams, broadening their uses far beyond anything Feynman or Dyson had ever imagined. Following the diagrams around -- attending closely to how the tool became stabilized, how its use became "second nature" to new generations of physicists -- thus illuminates broader transformations in the recent history of physics, complementing the long-standing tradition of focusing on "paradigms," "worldviews," or "theories" as a way to understand science and its development. (For a synopsis, see "Physics and Feynman's Diagrams.") The book has been honored with the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society (2007) and the Book Prize of the Forum for History of Science in America (2006).
My second book, American Physics and the Cold War Bubble (University of Chicago Press, in preparation), examines a massive experiment in social engineering that unfolded in the United States during the decades after World War II, in what might be called the credentialing of America. Higher education was booming; the classrooms of American colleges and universities bulged as never before, thanks to programs like the G.I. Bill. Enrollments in nearly every field grew exponentially. Yet graduate enrollments in physics grew fastest of all, at almost twice the rate of all other fields combined. Twenty-five years later, enrollments across nearly all fields in the United States underwent a major contraction. Physics again led the way, falling faster and deeper than any other field. Rising fastest and falling hardest, physics set the trend for larger transitions in American intellectual life, both in good times and bad. Unprecedented enrollment pressures -- and their equally unprecedented disappearance -- changed the nature of what it meant to be a physicist, from the rise of bureaucracy, to the specter of specialization, to a shift in the guiding epistemology behind cutting-edge research. The physicists' case stands as a cautionary tale -- highlighting the promise as well as the special challenges inherent in runaway growth -- as fields such as genomics and nanotechnology undergo their own frantic expansion today.
Research Interests: Particle Cosmology
My physics research is in particle cosmology, working at the interface of particle physics and gravitation. In particular, most of my work has focused on inflationary cosmology, an early phase during which the size of the universe expanded exponentially quickly just fractions of a second after the big bang. (For a review, see "Inflationary Cosmology.") My interest was in how such inflationary expansion might have come to an end in a process called "reheating," when the energy that had driven the rapid expansion was converted into particles more like the kind we see around us today. In many models, the decay of this inflationary energy occurs resonantly (somewhat akin to a laser, rather than an ordinary light bulb), far from equilibrium. In some cases these resonant interactions can amplify large gravitational fluctuations, which might (in principle) prove detectable in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Moreover, the techniques used to study the dynamics of reheating can also be applied to many other kinds of interactions, such as phase transitions in condensed-matter physics and in nuclear physics. For my work on reheating and gravitational fluctuations, I collaborated with Bruce Bassett and Roy Maartens.
More recently, my physics research has focused on the behavior of gravity in models in which our universe has more than four dimensions. Higher-dimensional theories have many motivations, the most prominent at this time being superstring theories. Interesting questions arise when one tries to understand cosmological consequences -- such as the expansion rate of the universe or the strength of gravity over various distance scales -- of these higher-dimensional models. For this work I am collaborating with Alan Guth, Philip Mannheim, and Ali Nayeri. (For a review, see "Inflationary Cosmology.")
Publications
Books and Edited Volumes
American Physics and the Cold War Bubble (University of Chicago Press, in preparation). A study of the intertwining of institutions and epistemology in American higher education during the Cold War. Following the fortunes of the discipline of physics -- which grew fastest of all fields after World War II, and crashed hardest around 1970 -- the book traces how the boom-and-bust cycle of enrollments shaped what would count as "good" or "appropriate" scholarship.
Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (University of Chicago Press, 2005). A study of how Richard Feynman's calculational aids spread from a small cluster of users to dominate several branches of modern physics. Along the way, many groups of young physicists adapted the diagrams' pictorial form, calculational role, and interpreted meaning. The dispersion of Feynman diagrams thus illuminates larger transformations of postwar theoretical physics, from what would count as "theory" to how students would be trained to become "theorists." (For a synopsis, see "Physics and Feynman's Diagrams.")
Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. David Kaiser (MIT Press, 2005). The essays collected in this volume examine how scientists' and engineers' training shapes their research and careers. Examples are drawn from a variety of cultural and political settings during the 19th and 20th centuries (ranging from Victorian Britain to interwar Japan, Stalinist Russia, and Cold War America), and from a range of fields (from theoretical physics to electrical engineering, nuclear weapons science to quantum chemistry).
Twentieth-Century Theoretical Physics in Political Contexts, ed. Alexis de Greiff and David Kaiser. Special issue of Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (Fall 2002): 1-192.
Science and Society: The History of Modern Physical Science in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2001). A 4-volume anthology edited and with introductions by Peter Galison, Michael Gordin, and David Kaiser. Volume 1 (Making Special Relativity); Volume 2 (Making General Relativity); Volume 3 (Quantum Histories); and Volume 4 (Physical Science and the Language of War).
Articles: History of Science
2007.
"The Other Evolution Wars," American Scientist 95 (Nov-Dec 2007): 518-525. (Free, text-only version available here.)
2007.
"When Fields Collide," Scientific American 296 (June 2007): 62-69. Reprinted in German translation as "Duell der Felder," Spektrum der Wissenschaft (Oct 2007): 26-33
2007.
"Turning Physicists into Quantum Mechanics," Physics World 20 (May 2007): 28-33. Reprinted in Polish translation as "Jak ksztalcic mechnikow kwantowych," Postepy Fizyki 58 (Sep-Oct 2007): 201-206.
2007.
"Scientific Training and the Creation of Scientific Knowledge: Historical, Sociological, and Anthropological Perspectives," with Cyrus Mody, in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 377-402.
2007.
"Viki Weisskopf: Searching for Simplicity in a Complicated World," Physics @ MIT 20 (2007): 44-56.
2007.
"Richard Feynman" and "Victor Weisskopf," in The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2007).
2007.
"The Mutual Embrace: Institutions and Epistemology," in Positioning the History of Science, ed. Kostas Gavroglu and Jürgen Renn (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 99-103.
2006.
"The Physics of Spin: Sputnik Politics and American Physicists in the 1950s," Social Research 73 (Winter 2006): 1225-1252.
2006.
"Whose Mass is it Anyway? Particle Cosmology and the Objects of Theory," Social Studies of Science 36 (August 2006): 533-564.
2005.
"The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during the Early Cold War," Representations 90 (Spring 2005): 28-60.
2005.
"Training and the Generalist's Vision in the History of Science," Isis 96 (June 2005): 244-251.
2005.
"Physics and Feynman's Diagrams," American Scientist 93 (March-April 2005): 156-165. (Free text-only copy available here.) Reprinted in Spanish translation as "La fisica y los diagramas de Feynman," Investigacion y Ciencia (Sep 2005): 74-83.
2005.
"Einstein's Teachers," in Albert Einstein: Chief Engineer of the Universe, ed. Jürgen Renn (Berlin: Wiley VCH, 2005), 152-155.
2004.
"The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics," American Quarterly 56 (December 2004): 851-888.
2004.
"Spreading the Tools of Theory: Feynman Diagrams in the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union," with Kenji Ito and Karl Hall, Social Studies of Science 34 (December 2004): 879-922.
2004.
"Making Tools Travel: Pedagogy and the Transfer of Skill in Postwar Theoretical Physics," in Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. David Kaiser (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 41-74.
2004.
"Kuhn, Foucault, and the Power of Pedagogy," with Andrew Warwick, in Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. David Kaiser (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 393-409.
2003.
"Sightings" (column on Feynman diagrams), with Felice Frankel, American Scientist 91 (Sep-Oct 2003): 450-451.
2002.
"Scientific Manpower, Cold War Requisitions, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (Fall 2002): 131-159.
2002.
"Nuclear Democracy: Political Engagement, Pedagogical Reform, and Particle Physics in Postwar America," Isis 93 (June 2002): 229-268.
2001.
"Francis E. Low: Coming of Age as a Physicist in Postwar America," Physics @ MIT 14 (2001): 24-31, 70-77.
2000.
"Stick-Figure Realism: Conventions, Reification, and the Persistence of Feynman Diagrams, 1948-1964," Representations 70 (2000): 49-86.
2000.
"Richard Feynman" and "Physics: 20th Century," in Reader’s Guide to the History of Science, ed. Arne Hessenbruch (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 257-258, 566-568.
1998.
"A Mannheim for All Seasons: Bloor, Merton, and the Roots of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge," Science in Context 11 (1998): 51-87.
1998.
"A psi is just a psi? Pedagogy, Practice, and the Reconstitution of General Relativity, 1942-1975," Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 29 (1998): 321-338. Reprinted in Making General Relativity, ed. Peter Galison, Michael Gordin, and David Kaiser (New York: Routledge, 2001), 291-308.
1998.
"Do Feynman Diagrams Endorse a Particle Ontology? The Roles of Feynman Diagrams in S-Matrix Theory," in Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Field Theory, ed. Tian Yu Cao (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 343-356.
1994.
"Bringing the Human Actors Back On Stage: The Personal Context of the Einstein-Bohr Debate," British Journal for the History of Science 27 (1994): 129-152.
1994.
"Niels Bohr’s Conceptual Legacy in Contemporary Particle Physics," in Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Jan Faye and Henry Folse (Boston: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 257-268.
1992.
"More Roots of Complementarity: Kantian Aspects and Influences," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 23 (1992): 213-239.
Articles: Physics
(Most of these articles are available from the SLAC-SPIRES High Energy Physics Electronic Library.)
2008.
"Population Modeling of the Emergence and Development of Scientific Fields," with Luis Bettencourt, Jasleen Kaur, Carlos Castillo-Chavez, and David Wojick. Scientometrics (2008): in press.
2006.
"The Power of a Good Idea: Quantitative Modeling of the Spread of Ideas from Epidemiological Models," with Luis Bettencourt, Ariel Cintron-Arias, and Carlos Castillo-Chavez. Physica A 364 (2006): 513-536.
2005.
"Inflationary Cosmology: Exploring the Universe from the Smallest to the Largest Scales," with Alan Guth, Science 307 (11 Feb 2005): 884-890.
2000.
"Restoring the Sting to Metric Preheating," with Bruce Bassett, Roy Maartens, and Christopher Gordon, Physical Review D 61 (2000): 061302 (Rapid Communication).
1999.
"Metric Preheating and Limitations of Linearized Gravity," with Bruce Bassett, Roy Maartens, and Fabrizio Tamburini, Nuclear Physics B 561 (1999): 188-240. (A topcite 50+ entry on SLAC-SPIRES.)
1999.
"General Relativistic Effects in Preheating," with Bruce Bassett and Roy Maartens, Physics Letters B 455 (1999): 84-89. (A topcite 100+ entry on SLAC-SPIRES.)
1999.
"Larger Domains from Resonant Decay of Disoriented Chiral Condensates," Physical Review D 59 (1999): 117901.
1998.
"Where do all the Supercurvature Modes Go?," with Joanne Cohn, Physical Review D 58 (1998): 083515.
1998.
"Resonance Structure for Preheating with Massless Fields," Physical Review D 57 (1998): 702-711.
1997.
"Preheating in an Expanding Universe: Analytic Results for the Massless Case," Physical Review D 56 (1997): 706-716.
1996.
"Post-Inflation Reheating in an Expanding Universe," Physical Review D 53 (1996): 1776-1783. (A topcite 50+ entry on SLAC-SPIRES.)
1995.
"Primordial Spectral Indices from Generalized Einstein Theories," Physical Review D 52 (1995): 4295-4306.
1994.
"Induced-gravity Inflation and the Density Perturbation Spectrum," Physics Letters B 340 (1994): 23-28.
1994.
"Constraints in the context of Induced-gravity Inflation," Physical Review D 49 (1994): 6347-6353.
1993.
"Distinguishing a Charged Higgs Signal from a Heavy WR Signal," Physics Letters B 306 (1993): 125-128.
1990.
"Working Apparatus for Determining Metals’ Relative Rates of Oxidation," BASE: A Journal of Science and Technology 8 (1990): 53-58.
Public Broadcasting Appearances
Advisory Board member, NOVA documentary film about modern cosmology, The Fabric of the Cosmos, in preparation.
Contributor to PBS Wired Science television segment on the X-prize. Originally broadcast on PBS on 7 November 2007.
Contributor to NOVA ScienceNOW television segment on nuclear physics and the "island of stability." Originally broadcast on PBS on 3 October 2006. Listen to an extended podcast of the interview.
Contributor to NOVA documentary film about Einstein's equation, E = mc2, entitled, "Einstein's Big Idea." Originally broadcast on PBS on 11 October 2005.
Guest on National Public Radio "Science Friday," 24 June 2005, to discuss the one-hundredth anniversary of Einstein's special relativity.
Honors and Awards
2007.
History of Science Society, Pfizer Award for best book in the field, awarded for Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics. Read the Pfizer Award citation here.
2006.
Forum for History of Science in America Book Prize, awarded for Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics.
2006.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, awarded to one tenure-track faculty member for "exceptional distinction in teaching and research."
2005.
Forum for History of Science in America Article Prize, awarded for the article, "The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics."
2004.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Graduate Student Council Teaching Award, awarded to one professor in MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences "for excellence in teaching a graduate level course."
2001.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Levitan Prize in the Humanities, awarded to one faculty member at MIT for "innovative and creative scholarship in the humanities."
2000.
British Society for the History of Science, Ivan Slade Prize (best article in the field) runner-up, awarded for the article, "Stick-Figure Realism."
1996-99.
Harvard University, awarded three Certificates for Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
1993.
American Physical Society, Leroy Apker Award, awarded first place nationally "for outstanding achievement in physics by an undergraduate student."
1992.
Dartmouth College, Phi Beta Kappa Society, junior-year recipient.
Course Offerings
Here are the MIT OpenCourseWare sites for some classes I regularly offer:
STS.002
Toward the Scientific Revolution
8.225 / STS.042
Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th Century
STS.310
Introduction to the History of Science
STS.436
Cold War Science