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Article ID: CBB816867246

Prestige Asymmetry in American Physics: Aspirations, Applications, and the Purloined Letter Effect (2017)

Science in Context
Volume: 30
Issue: 4
Pages: 475-506

URI: http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/science-in-context/article/prestige-asymmetry-in-american-physics-aspirations-applications-and-the-purloined-letter-effect/7421B49270A1E216DCE37E08E95F4B22

DOI: 10.1017/S0269889717000242

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Science and society Science and technology, relationships Discipline formation Physics Atomic, nuclear, and particle physics 20th century, late United States

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.”

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