PhysicsWeb provides me with yet another blog post topic today, posting a lament about the death of letter writing, which makes life more difficult for historians:
Now that e-mail has replaced letter writing as the principal means of informal communication, one has to feel sorry for future science historians, who will be unable to use letters and telegrams to establish facts and gauge reactions to events. In addition to the Copenhagen episode, another example of the role of letters is Stillman Drake’s startling conclusion, based on a careful reading of Galileo’s correspondence, that the Leaning Tower event actually happened. And of all the reactions to the discovery of parity violation in 1957, the simplest and most direct expression of shock came from Robert Oppenheimer. After receiving a telegram from Chen Ning Yang with the news, Oppenheimer cabled back: “Walked through door.”
Letters are also useful to historians because the character of scientists can often be revealed more clearly in informal communications than in official documents. Catherine Westfall, who has composed histories of both the Fermilab and Argonne national laboratories, likes to point out that letters often reveal leadership styles in striking ways. “[Former Fermilab director] Robert R Wilson knew he was making history and was ironically self-conscious,” she once told me. “Leon Lederman [another Fermilab director] told jokes, [while former Argonne director] Hermann Grunder wrote letters that were really never-ending to-do lists.”
There are really two problems her: the technical issue of being unable to read older electronic archives, and the social issue of people not writing the same sorts of things in email that the older generation did on paper. Of course, the solution to both problems is right there in their own magazine: more blogging by physicists.
Blogs are publicly available as HTML files (as consistent a format as you’ll get from the computer industry), archived and cached by a bunch of Internet archivists, and provide an outlet for lengthier discussions of topics of interest to physicists and historians. It’s the perfect solution.
A hundred years from now, if I become really famous, historians and biographers will have no end of useful material to go through, taken from this blog (“Chapter 7: He, um, really liked his dog…”). I’m doing this for posterity, you see.