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Prestige Asymmetry in American Physics: Aspirations, Applications, and the Purloined Letter Effect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

Joseph D. Martin
Joseph D. Martin*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge E-mail: [email protected]
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Argument

Why do similar scientific enterprises garner unequal public approbation? High energy physics attracted considerable attention in the late-twentieth-century United States, whereas condensed matter physics – which occupied the greater proportion of US physicists – remained little known to the public, despite its relevance to ubiquitous consumer technologies. This paper supplements existing accounts of this much remarked-upon prestige asymmetry by showing that popular emphasis on the mundane technological offshoots of condensed matter physics and its focus on human-scale phenomena have rendered it more recondite than its better-known sibling field. News reports about high energy physics emphasize intellectual achievement; reporting on condensed matter physics focuses on technology. And whereas frontier-oriented rhetoric of high energy physics communicates ideals of human potential, discoveries that smack of the mundane highlight human limitations and fail to resonate with the widespread aspirational vision of science – a consequence I call “the purloined letter effect.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 475 - 506
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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