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This book is about what theoretical physicists do and how their daily routines shifted in the wake of the Second World War. I focus on the crafting of theoretical tools, techniques, and practices—the everyday labor of theory—to complement the usual treatments in intellectual and conceptual histories. At stake are our assumptions about how theorists have spent their time and structured their activities. Have their primary concerns centered narrowly on the construction and selection of theories, or have they had other goals in mind when taking pencil and paper in hand? How should historians account for their work?
If we assume (as usual) that the quest for distinct scientific theories—delimited by the philosophers' anemic labels T1, T2, T3—and the selection of one best theory have dominated theorists' work, then we might be inclined to organize our historical analyses around the birth and death of particular theories. Indeed, today we have huge literatures charting the development of Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics, Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, Schrödinger's wave mechanics, their union in a theory of quantum mechanics, and so on. Yet as the best of these historical studies have shown, the objects of study in such cases—“special relativity,” say, or “quantum mechanics”—are rarely single or unitary objects at all. Scientific theories are always open to divergent interpretations and uses, even decades after their construction and selection have supposedly been settled. Moreover, theoretical physicists have had much more on their plates than just theories. Theirs has been a world littered with calculations—calculations performed with an ever-changing toolbox of techniques.
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