Physics Hero

In Pilgrim's Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life of Physics, author Sharon Traweek analyzes and deconstructs what are perceived to be the stages of a career in physics academia. Three stages compromise a novice period: undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral. During these phases, Traweek explores how the physics students fears and hero worship will transform and grow. The fear goes moves from anxiety about ones own insignificance in their undergrad years to a worry about whether they are making the best use of time in grad school, and culminates in worry about the future: will their discoveries be of lasting significance? Will they become one of the heroes in textbooks they once worshipped? Traweek’s exploration of this ingrained hero worship is intriguing. She selects a particular heroic form that illustrates how the student views oneself and other scientists at each stage. First, the epic hero, a super human above the everyday: this is how a undergraduate might envision the figures they see in their texts. Next, the high mimetic hero emerges, who is superior among men but susceptible to the failures of technology and environment. Finally, the hero takes the form of the low mimetic. He struggles for everything he gets. He is not so much better than his peers as he is more determined and less easily dissuaded from his path. This progress clearly illustrates a maturing of a student. As he moves higher up in the field and closer to his superiors, the heroic figures of physics and their great experiments lose some of their mysticism but also gain more respect from their realism. The student grows to appreciate the work as much as the genius of their predecessors. This analysis also brings out an important point that lurks in the background of this study of the physics field. The students and teachers never fully grow out of seeing themselves as characters in their own story. Each works to create not just discoveries but also anecdotes that could be written up in a subsection of a textbook someday. Perhaps this kind of perspective infringes on the purity of the study of physics, but perhaps it also motivates it.