At Porton Down, Britain’s central chemical warfare establishment, scientific managers regularly engaged in bureaucratic triage. Working in conjunction with the Ministry of Supply, their task was to properly allocate scarce resources to a variety of multi-disciplinary research problems related to chemical warfare. Areas of inquiry included dispersal methods, protective measures, mechanisms of toxicity, novel agents, and processes for testing all of the above. To streamline resource allocation, managers periodically reviewed research programs and graded them on a multi-point priority scale. In theory, extra-mural research teams were expected to follow these priority lists. In practice, they occasionally resisted instructions. This talk examines moments of conflict between Porton’s establishment and two of its contracted teams at Cambridge University, one led by Malcolm Dixon (Department of Biochemistry) and another co-directed by Hamilton McCombie and Bernard Charles Saunders (Department of Chemistry). These disputes were not only about research autonomy. As I argue, they also touched on basic classifications of scientific work. The categories of fundamental versus applied, long-range versus short-range, and exploratory versus targeted — long used to describe and order scientific research — were themselves up for debate in these bureaucratic disputes. Defining them was not an exact science. To organize chemical weapons research, participants first had to make conjectures about the probable course of the war, the likely capabilities of enemy states, and the speed of their own innovation. In this case, contrasting visions of the future undergirded distinct approaches to wartime research.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the physics of complex matter has posed an organizational challenge for American physics. After World War II, specialties focused on the properties of complex matter—metals, polymers, semiconductors, and other materials—emerged as the most populous subspecialties of the American physics community. But materials, defined by their applications, upset a traditional organizational scheme that divided the field along lines drawn by phenomena when materials-focused specialties sought representation within the field’s institutions. Their emerging dominance threatened, for some, the cohesion and purpose of physics as a discipline.

As physicists sought to fit a growing community invested in researching the physics of complex matter into the community structures of American physics, they pioneered new ways of organizing the field. These efforts spawned solid state physics, condensed matter physics, and materials physics, among other smaller subfields, in the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, they have driven the growth of fields like complex systems theory and soft matter physics. This talk traces those changes from the mid-twentieth through the early twenty first centuries. It shows how attention to these changes, and the convictions about the identity and purpose of physics that impelled them, can not only illuminate the dynamics that governed how physicists divided their labor, but also show how the organization of knowledge and labor within physics influenced its connections with changing social and political contexts.

The Soviet science policy is known for its emphasis on applied research. This raises questions about how more theoretical approaches gained themselves a place in the system. Where theoretical physicists could make the case that their “new physics” was the same age as the revolution, and hence had a legitimate place in the Soviet research agenda, theoretical chemists’ arguments have received less attention. This talk focuses especially on the efforts of Nikolai Nikolayevich Semenov (1896-1986), who throughout his career attempted to gain recognition for more theoretical approaches to chemistry. Semenov, who is recognised for the discovery of chain reactions and his works on chemical kinetics and reactivity, published several articles in venues such as Pravda to argue for the importance of theoretical research for the Soviet science system. This talk brings his arguments in conversation with other physical scientists’ efforts to gain recognition and patronage for their field.

Materials, or the sciences of materials, have been a central concern of Japan since its modernization, as it has repeatedly reaffirmed its self-recognition as a “resource-poor nation.” Scientists have developed and categorized their practice with materials over time, forging a series of research fields, or disciplines. These classifications, however, differed from Western categorizations such as solid and condensed matter physics and materials science and engineering.
By looking at several Japanese words used to refer to materials and substances, such as “shigen,” “zairyô,” and “busshitsu,” this talk illuminates how the physical sciences of materials in Japan were intertwined with the national contexts. These Japanese words have different connotations, especially in terms of application, and thereby reflect the social contexts in which related endeavors were placed. The stories of the words thus tell us how the scientists involved utilized the categories and disciplines, partly being bound by them, and how the disciplinary structure or landscape of the physical sciences of materials differs, depending on the national contexts. This talk also sheds light on the complex identities of physicists and chemists, theorists and experimentalists, and scientists and engineers and puts the boundaries into a historical perspective.