A History of Substance Michael Gordin Applauds a Study Tracing 70 Tumultuous Years of Solid-State Physics

Femtosecond laser systems, which emit ultrashort optical pulses, are used to probe fundamental properties of solid-state materials.

PHYSICS A history of substance Michael Gordin applauds a study tracing 70 tumultuous years of solid-state physics.

hat is “physics”? From the birth of Joseph Martin presents high-energy physics, the Superconducting the nuclear age at the end of the in Solid State Insurrec- Super Collider (SSC), in 1993. That cancel- Second World War, physics has tion — but his focus is lation was influenced by criticisms before Woften been portrayed as the quest to pen- not those landmarks. congressional committees from eminent etrate the atom; to divine the secrets of the For him, “physics is condensed-matter specialists, such as Nobel subnuclear realm of mesons and quarks with what physicists decide laureate Philip Anderson of Bell Labs. ever more impressive accelerators and ever it is”. This is not some This dispute was about more than more gargantuan particle detectors. High- slogan of radical rela- resources. Already in the 1970s, solid-state energy physics was the glamorous stuff that tivism. It is a recogni- physicists such as Anderson and Alvin attracted Nobel prizes and lavish press cov- tion that physics is a Weinberg had articulated an alternative vision Solid State erage. Most books on the history of physics profession, and it is Insurrection: How of the science of physics. Particle physicists consider it the backbone of the field. the business of profes- the Science of justified themselves through a commitment Studying elementary particles is not, sional groups to police Substance Made to “pure science” that dated back to the origins LAB/DEPT OF ENERGY ENERGY RENEWABLE US NATL however, what most physicists do. By almost their boundaries. American Physics of the American Physical Society (APS) in the all metrics — PhD degrees, articles in flag- In the United States, Matter late nineteenth century. Because high-energy ship journals, memberships in professional the motivation of JOSEPH D. MARTIN physics probed the smallest constituents University of Pittsburgh societies — the majority were not, and are not, much of that policing Press (2018) of matter, a reductionist would say that high-energy physicists. Instead, they plough was access to funding: such physics was the most “fundamental”. the furrows of what was once known as high-energy physicists got loads of it from Anderson disagreed. As Martin explains in solid-state physics — better known since the the government, and solid-state physicists an excellent chapter, for Anderson “funda- 1970s as condensed-matter physics. This is were shunted to industry. For decades, con- mental physics” was about ferromagnets as the science that brought us superconductivity, descension blossomed on one side and resent- well as about quarks. superfluidity, magnetic memory, liquid- ment festered on the other. Matters came to Then came the SSC. “The original Star crystal displays and more. a head in a decision by Congress to cancel Wars trilogy tells the story of a ragtag band This is the physics that the science historian what would have been the crown jewel of US of misfits, many of whom are adept at

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manipulating a force pervading in every- day matter, who ally to mount an insurrection against the established order and Forgotten heroes of help destroy a giant, partially built beam machine,” writes Martin. The trajectory of US solid-state physics, he notes, “fol- the Enigma story lowed much the same plot”. Although he concedes that the SSC was more drasti- Joanne Baker enjoys a tale of the Polish cryptographers cally affected by the end of the cold war than by intradisciplinary critique, there is who paved the way for Alan Turing’s wartime feats. no doubt where Martin’s sympathies lie. He devotes most of his book to a detailed reconstruction of the intense lan Turing’s crucial unscrambling the mathematicians’ struggle, half a century earlier, for rec- of German messages in the Second families have shared ognition by solid-state physicists against World War was a tour de force of personal letters. the leadership of the APS, which was Acodebreaking. From 1940 onwards, Turing Turing unearths a itself frustrated and challenged by the and his team engineered hundreds of elec- remarkable tale of rapid growth in their ranks during the tronic machines, dubbed bombes, which intellect, bravery and 1940s. Physicists who worked on metals, decrypted the thousands of missives sent by camaraderie that ceramics and other domains straddling enemy commanders each day to guide their reads like a nail-biting fundamental and applied physics wanted soldiers. This deluge of knowledge short- spy novel. representation at APS meetings, leading ened the war. Bletchley Park, UK — the Polish skills in X, Y & Z: The to the creation of the Division of Solid secret centre where it all happened — rightly Real Story of cryptography and State Physics in 1947. The institutional gained its place in history. But as with all How Enigma Was radio engineer- gerrymandering had significant implica- breakthroughs, many more people laid the Broken ing came together tions for the APS, especially for its flagship foundations. DERMOT TURING during the 1920 journal, Physical Review. (Publishing is a In his book X, Y & Z, Dermot Turing, The History Press Russo-Polish War. fascinating leitmotif in Martin’s account.) the great mathematician’s nephew, tells the (2018) Signallers decoded This organizational innovation was gripping story of a band of Polish math- a telegram from Red achieved only after substantial resistance ematicians who worked out much about Army military commander Joseph Stalin, from some APS stalwarts, who perceived how German Enigma encoding machines which indicated that an attack on Warsaw the purity of their ranks as becoming sul- operated, years before Alan Turing did. was imminent. Jamming the Russians’ radio lied by industrial scientists. The stalwarts The Poles shared their secrets with French communications bought enough time to included Harvard University’s John Van and British intelligence services before and secure and save the city. Maksymilian Ciężki Vleck, even though he had trained many during the Second World War — the letters and Antoni Palluth were among those sig- of the leaders of the next generation, X, Y and Z were shorthand for the French, nallers. After the 1920 conflict, Ciężki including Anderson. Van Vleck’s objec- British and Polish codebreaking teams, became leader of a radio-intelligence unit. tions were littered with political language: respectively. Palluth set up a business making electronic he protested against the “Balkanization” The author’s research is painstaking. After equipment, including radios the size of a of the APS, and he thought the solid-state the war, military documents were scattered credit card for Polish secret agents. division was a “new-deal-bureaucratic” across Europe, and key French records In 1926, the German navy began to send scheme that ought to be resisted. The con- were declassified only in 2016. Many messages that were scrambled in a more servative Van Vleck was unhappy about original Polish papers were destroyed, but random way, making them almost impos- the direction that the United States — and sible to decipher. They were encoded using with it physics — was going. the typewriter-like Enigma machine. The This raises a broader point about keyboard was wired so that typing one letter Martin’s engaging book: the politics in it lit up a different one in a set of bulbs on top. are exclusive to the profession. He keeps Rotors altered the path of the electric circuit his gaze tightly trained on physicists as with every keystroke. The machines were they define physics to each other. The commercially available, but modified for ANNA ZYGALSKA-CANNON Vietnam War (and scientific work in sup- German military use. Without knowing the port of it), anti-Communism, civil rights precise setting of a machine, there was no and other political fault lines — which way to unpick the code. affected physicists no less than other citi- The book tells how Ciężki hired a group of zens — are mentioned in passing, if at all. mathematics students to crack the problem. Yet they must have mattered. Physics is They worked quietly in basements and in a defined not just by what physicists decide bunker deep in the woods. Marian Rejewski, it is, but by what the broader society will an alumnus of Poznań University in Poland, (or won’t) support. That decision is made was one of them. At the helm was Gwido within the halls of the APS, but also in Langer, a Pole who had worked in radio those of Congress. ■ intelligence for the Austrian army. Meanwhile, in France, Gustave Bertrand Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten headed the equivalent unit. The French had Professor of Modern and Contemporary a more conventional approach to gather- History at Princeton University in ing information: good agents, clandestine New Jersey. meetings and generous pay-offs. Bertrand email: [email protected] Mathematician Marian Rejewski in 1942. managed two formidable spies. Rudolf