2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
intellectuals. China’s reception of relativity in these early years was fast and
almost unanimously positive. Fifty years later however, during the Cultural
Revolution, Einstein and his relativity became the targets of organized criticism.
This criticism was in general not scientific, but philosophical, ideological,
and political. Critics often deliberately confused relativity in physics with
relativism in philosophy. They labeled Einstein “the greatest bourgeois
reactionary academic authority in natural science,” and relativity a “reactionary
bourgeois theory” . The critics claimed they made Einstein and relativity
“targets of revolution” because “Natural science can not be advanced without
revolutionizing the theory of relativity.” This organized criticism was only a
beginning of the so-called unprecedented “proletarian scientific revolution”
in China. Ironically, the criticism movement in a sense helped promote the
studies on Einstein and relativity in China. One of most significant “byproducts”
was the publication of the comprehensive three-volume Chinese
translation of Einstein’s collected works, which were published in 1976, the
year when the “Cultural Revolution” ended. In this paper, I will trace the
origin and development of the criticism during the “Cultural Revolution” . I
will pay special attention to the motivations behind Einstein’s detractors.
Finally, I will discuss the consequences of the criticism and the lessons that
may be drawn from this upheaval in Chinese science.
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Karl Hufbauer University of California, Irvine
J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Path to Black Holes
During the winter and spring of 1939, as many leading American physicists
were rapidly following up on the announcement of nuclear fission, the
prominent theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Ph.D. candidate
Hartland S. Snyder were theorizing about the collapse of massive stars that
had exhausted their energy reserves into what have come to be called “black
holes.” In this paper I first argue that Oppenheimer’s academic contacts at
Caltech and Mt. Wilson over the preceding decade together with string of near
misses in his chosen field set the stage for his astrophysical research. Then I
delineate his immediate intellectual path from an interest in the sources of
stellar energy to an engagement with the profound yet esoteric problem of
stellar collapse, suggesting that Hans Bethe’s breakthrough on the first issue
was a powerful incentive for work on the second. Next I consider how
Oppenheimer and Snyder developed their scenario for a black hole’s formation.
And finally I discuss the reasons why the contemporary physics and astronomy
communities paid so little heed to their findings. Besides illuminating
Oppenheimer’s career and the history of theoretical astrophysics during the
1930s, this story is of interest for the light that it sheds on the general issues of
problem choice and research evaluation in interdisciplinary domains.
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