We Shall Be Like the Trees
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Physics in Perspective
Editorial We Shall Be Like the Trees
In a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 6, 2013, page B2), Sam Wineburg from Stanford University wrote: To make it in the academy, make sure no one outside understands a word you’re saying. In a similar vein, Peter Medawar wrote about Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher: Kant became notorious for his obscurity…. From Kant on, any petty metaphysician might hope to be given credit for profundity if what he said was almost impossible to follow. Sadly, these statements are true, especially in those subject areas that have the least substantive information to transmit to readers: strange words are combined in arcane sentences that often leave readers totally flummoxed. This reality influenced the thinking of John Rigden and Roger Stuewer, the departing editors of Physics in Perspective, long before this journal existed. Months before Physics in Perspective came into being in 1999, Rigden and Stuewer met in Boston with representatives from the Birkha¨user publishing house in Boston and Basel, Switzerland. The folks at Birkha¨user were making plans to end the publication of a physics research journal and to replace it with a scholarly journal that featured articles in the history of physics. Both Rigden and Stuewer believed that history provided an excellent vehicle to bring physics to a broad audience of general readers. We argued that the world did not need another scholarly journal in the history of physics; that is, scholarly in the sense of articles written by specialists for specialists. Rather, we proposed that what was needed and what we would be interested in doing was to create a scholarly journal in which authors built on the published literature and archival materials, but they eschewed the jargon understood only by specialists. In our first editorial (March 1999) we wrote: ‘‘The editors believe that the insights into physics that emerge from historical and philosophical studies can be presented in ways that make them accessible and engage the attention of a broad audience.’’ Our adopted approach presented a challenge to some potential contributors. Throughout our tenure as editors, we have had to reject many manuscripts because they could not be read and understood by the audience we were
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determined to reach. It has been surprising that when we have rejected an author’s manuscript and explained that Physics in Perspective was designed to reach a broad audience of nonspecialists, relatively few authors seemed willing (or able?) to respond with a revised manuscript appropriate for a general audience. One might conclude that it is as hard for a specialist to write for a nonspecialist as it is for a nonspecialist to comprehend the writing of a specialist. However, hard or not, many authors sent us wonderful manuscripts that we were proud to accept for publication. With this issue of Physics in Perspective, Rigden and Stuewer end their editorship and the next issue will come from the hands
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