Should history of physics questions be on topic?

Question

When we last visited the issue of history questions, the dedicated History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange was in its early stages. At that time, we decided against closing questions for being historical, but with the implication that it may make sense to revisit that decision someday.

Now that HSM SE is well established, the time seems right to do that revisit. So, going forward from here, do we want history-of-physics questions to be on topic? Where exactly should we draw the line between on-topic and off-topic historical questions?

Keep in mind this is primarily asking about history-of-physics questions to be asked in the future, not old ones that have already been asked here.

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Answer 1

Summary

History questions are welcome on this site whenever they have any bearing on our modern understanding of physics. However, if a question has only minimal or null bearing on our current understanding, or it specifically requires a historian's skills, toolset, and mindset to answer, then it should be migrated to the History of Science and Maths Stack Exchange site.

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I think we should stay open to a significant set of history questions, and we should keep the history tag. Unlike mathematics, the historical perspective is very often one of the key ways to understand the world and our knowledge about physics. The way physics is structured is very often centered around key experiments, and these are generally thought of as historical events and their contribution and motivation is understood in a historical perspective.

It doesn't have to be that way: you can perfectly well motivate, say, special relativity as one of only two possible cases, with the Galilean case ruled out through muon lifetime measurements, but you don't - you usually start with the Michelson-Morley experiment and tell the story from there.

(Math, on the other hand, does not have to do this: you can simply start with whatever axioms and definitions you want to work with, and you build your theory. Later on, or as an aside or a brief introduction, you might comment, as motivation, that the axioms went through this and then that version before people found the Right Version to use, but the brunt of the work in multiple fields $-$ particularly those taught in depth in physics degrees $-$ tends to follow from the axioms to the consequences rather than the historical refinements of the axioms.)

Going through recent, good-score questions on the history tag yields plenty of questions that are definitely of a historical character and yet have direct bearing on our understanding of physics, and which I think should definitely be on topic here. Taking a few non-rigorous picks,

• How did physicists know that only negative charges move?
• How did physicists know that there are two kind of charges?
• Why was the first discovered neutrino an anti-neutrino?
• How did we realize that light travels at a finite speed?
• Why is a second equal to the duration of exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of radiations?
• Did Newton conduct any experiments to find something called momentum, or was he such a great genius that he was able to spot it intuitively?
• Why was the Stark effect discovered much later than the Zeeman effect?

On the other hand, there are questions that should be moved to the history site, because they require a historian's skills, toolset, and mindset to answer, and because they have minimal or null bearing on our modern understanding of physics. From the first page of the search above, for example, this could include

• https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266815/was-einstein-familiar-with-the-michelson-gale-experiment (screenshot)
• Bohr on wholeness?
• What was Newton's own explanation of Newton's rings?

^{(For full clarity, these questions weren't migrated because it was too late to migrate them when this question was posted. If they were posted now, they would be migrated.)}

However, I find that the set of questions that satisfy that criterion strictly is really rather small. There is, though, a relatively large gray area of questions that are primarily of historical interest, but that still illuminate aspects of how we think about physics and why we no longer think or do certain things. Some examples from this category are

• Was Leverrier-Adams prediction of Neptune a lucky coincidence?
• The role of anharmonic oscillator(s) in Heisenberg's 1925 paper
• What are the original papers on the hydrogen spectral lines?
• Were the Michelson-Morley results a surprise?

I think these questions should be allowed here: they could also be asked at HSM if the OP is interested in a science historian's perspective, but there is no need to migrate them if asked here, in which case the focus should be (because it can be) on how that part of the historical record helps explain how we think of physics. If the OP wants to shift the focus specifically to what some historical character thought and did, what information they had available, and so on, then it can move to HSM.

Answer 2

In general, I'd say no, they should not be on topic here. However, I could see myself making an exception for questions asking how a problem in physics was historically solved. I don't mean a homework-like problem; I mean, for instance, how the Bohr model was realized to be incorrect and replaced with the more modern model. Questions asking about the history behind the development of strictly modern physics are probably okay. Questions asking about the history of the physicists themselves, the history of non-modern physics, or about historical practices in physics are probably off-topic. So, I would say that a question asking what the Ptolemaic model was replaced with would be off-topic because it doesn't directly involve modern physics.

Answer 3

Yes, Since many physics questions are better understood when there history is learned