Meanwhile, in this postwar academic boom where the fetishization of pure science by popular culture seemed to grow in direct proportion to institutional growth, high energy physicists maximized their privileged position within the scientific community as a whole.  Traweek writes that:

In the new mission-oriented labs of World War II, high energy physicists learned to administer large interdisciplinary teams of researchers, manage huge budgets, and speak the language of government agencies. […] high energy physicists have maintained personal ties and influence in Washington.  At the same time, their organizational skills and political acumen have not gone unnoticed in the universities: the expansion of the resources of physics departments is the envy of other disciplines, and many senior high energy physicists have become university deans, provosts, and presidents.[11]

Throughout the fifties and sixties, the ‘statesmen’ of high energy physics were able to leverage their organizational and political expertise to win funding and protect their functional autonomy, to, in effect, reinvent that nineteenth-century German innovation, the autotelic graduate department, pumping out with increasing frequency PhDs as well as basic research, both experimental and theoretical.

            But in the 1970s, Graham and Diamond point to ‘shifting demographic, economic, and political conditions’ as the source of the relative stagnation in American higher education.[12]  While the details of this relative stagnation are unimportant to the discussion at hand, it is worth observing that for high energy physics, the timing could not have been worse.  As mentioned earlier, at the time, the standard model, along with its direct descendents quantum chromodynamics and the various quantum field theories, had been approaching, for practical purposes, full maturity.  This made it much more difficult for high energy physicists to convince the special interest groups who were responsible for distributing research funding, whether the NSF or within the respective universities themselves, that the projects they supported, the increasingly less dramatic ‘problems’ they proposed to solve, justified the expense.  This in turn, put pressure on the theorists, concerned as they were about their career security in a hiring market where they witnessed a dwindling demand for college and university teachers[13], to conform more closely to the community’s definition of cosmological orthodoxy.

            With the recovery of the American economy in 1982, this climate of stagnation seemed to change: the Reagan administration pushed through an appropriations bill that more than doubled the amount of funding available to the NSF for dispensation.[14]  But the Reagan administration’s largesse came with a catch: perhaps in accord with its explicit agenda to win the Cold War, the advisory board was instructed to favor applied over basic research.  While the Reagan administration supported the proposed Superconducting Supercollider, as we will be seeing in the next chapter, even that initiative ultimately failed in the early 1990s to make its case.  Research on potential defense technology, even Reagan’s fantastical pet project ‘Star Wars’, had clear precedent.  In this atmosphere of the 1980s, where funding flowed freely primarily to applied research, one could argue that it was the experimenters who found themselves in the more tenuous position politically.  High energy physics experiments, while closer on the spectrum to applied rather than pure research, are nevertheless, by a significant order of magnitude, much more costly than the practice of theory.   In the mid-1980s, experimental high energy physics found itself in an excluded middle between applied research that directly served national interests, such as defense or economic competitive advantage, and pure research, which could keep the populous theoretical physics community, a tangible legacy of the golden age in basic research of the 1960s, busy—and at a relative bargain.  As Steven Weinberg writes of the early articulations of a theory of everything in the face of daunting incommensurabilities in the formalism of the two theories they were attempting to synthesize: ‘This of course did not stop some theorists from constructing very unnatural theories […] in accordance with the oldest rule of progress in science, that it is better to be doing something than nothing.’[15] 

            Since the 1990s, from an economic and institutional perspective, this gap between applied and basic research has perhaps expanded.  Graham and Diamond argue that ‘the threat of a prolonged downward spiral in federal R&D funding and research support as expenditures on entitlement programs, debt service, and deficit reduction squeeze[d] out discretionary spending by the mission agencies’ and threatened to aggravate an already tense national ambivalence over the evolution of American research universities.  In spite of the American system’s widely acknowledged world dominance in research acumen, attacks have increased by the press and advocate groups for a wide range of peccadilloes, including, among other things, ‘frivolous courses and research, grade inflation, student cheating, faculty sinecures, corruption […], scientific fraud, and bloated administrations’.[16]  With the emphasis in the American university system on the marketplace, the faculty feel more and more acutely a pressure to justify research direction and concomitant expenditures before an ever widening constituency of stakeholders: from the incoming students and their parents, to the undergraduates that represent potential recruits to graduate programs, to alumni and other patrons of the university endowments, to administrative superiors, to a federal government that provides vital supplemental funding through the NSF and other consumer-oriented programs such as subsidized student loans, to state governments that regulate university accreditation and dole out their own funding, to the media, and lastly, to public opinion, taken as an amorphous, fragmented, and fickle whole.  In this economic climate of intensifying liberalization, fragmentation of markets, and privatization, high energy physicists have found it ever more difficult to attract sponsorship, whether from private businesses, that, understandably, prioritize research that facilitates marketable technologies, or from peer-review groups beyond their own that, due to the fragmentation of the practice of high energy physics into increasingly solipsistic theoretical domains, find it difficult to maintain the necessary interdisciplinary expertise to make informed judgments.  Like some cutting-edge speculative cosmologies, the university, which, in its utopian form, Björn Wittrock defines as ‘a true universe of all relevant domains of discourse which altogether reflect the sum total of human knowledge’, runs the risk of becoming a multiverse of braneworlds, a rapidly propagating constellation of mini-universes, isolated from each other within incommensurable domains of discourse and no longer capable of maintaining an ‘epistemic and normative universalism’. [17] 

            In this institutional milieu of fragmentation and incommensurability, the ‘emotional power of cosmology’[18], as Traweek puts it, takes on, with string theory, an uncanny metaphorical undertone: string theory attempts to recompile the proliferation and fragmentation of fundamental particles, with their constitutionally fixed, a priori constants, into one coherent ontology, by the subtle conceptual shift of extending those point particles out into an extra dimension.  In string theory, the multitude of quanta transform themselves into the vibrational resonances of one entity, the string.  But in its current state, string theory cannot fully achieve this utopian unification as strings multiply, along and extra, extended conceptual dimension, into p-branes, D-branes, and zero-branes and the string theories themselves fragment and propagate into the various ten dimensional models, into M-theory, into F-theory, and other hybrids.  This conceptual fragmentation within string theory would seem to both reflect and confirm the fragmentation of its production within the community of theorists itself.

            So, to return to the question of string theory’s allure—from a socio-political perspective: Penrose suggests, at least by implication, that string theory finds currency as a form of belonging.  String theorists can take comfort in knowing that their work holds the promise of binding them to a community of practice, that is both relatively stable in its norms and hierarchies, as well as locked into a certain epistemological and ontological momentum.  Of course, describing community in terms of membership as its own end runs the risk of platitude, since one could make this observation about any community.  What distinguishes the string theory community from many other communities of practice is the conceptual space through which membership manifests.  Experimenters are bound practically to their instruments, the accelerators, colliders, and detectors; conceptually, they are bound, to a lesser degree, to the data that their instruments produce and record; and lastly, experimenters are bound to the theoretical framework within which the data is organized.  Belonging for experimenters finds a more concrete embodiment in their daily interactions with equipment and instruments; the spaces of their practice takes on a localized, even gritty specificity.  String theorists, in contrast, find membership in a virtual space more akin to mathematics than experimental physics, where conceptual embodiment undergoes ever increasing transmutation into abstraction.  I will argue in the next chapter that string theorists have become ever more aware that this retreat into a virtual space of praxis, which they would defend vigorously as a logical necessity, risks solipsism.

On the other hand, the virtual space of string theory practice offers an explosion in its degrees of freedom, deleterious, in Penrose’s opinion, to the theory’s potential inevitability, but auspicious to whatever ludic sensibilities a string theorist may have.  So many degrees of freedom promise a tremendous potential for existential and practical busy-ness—concretized in the sheer excess of problems to be solved.  All that needs to be done, then, for political survival, is to hone an equilibrium between the theory’s exclusivity, how its peripheries are closed, and its accessibility, how its peripheries are opened, and significantly, opened to which particular contacts.  This balancing act is akin to the American research university’s mission in general to negotiate the competing pressures of meritocracy and the demands of a mass market.  In the current institutional climate where an excluded middle between applied and pure research stigmatizes experimental high energy physics, string theory can protect its boundaries by making its epistemic and methodological demands more opaque to its immediate competition, thereby short-circuiting any technically targeted criticism, while enhancing the imaginative allure of the theory’s conceptual underpinnings, opening the discipline to its commoditization in the marketplace and thus to a continued widening cultural currency—in short, baffle the meritocracy while delighting the masses.

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