"That attitude does not exist so much today, but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics"
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A little bitterness hides inside Gould's calm, matter-of-fact phrasing. "That attitude does not exist so much today" isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a subtle indictment of an older academic culture that treated usefulness as a contaminant. In mid-century American physics, "basic" didn’t merely mean fundamental. It meant prestigious, pure, protected from the grubby world of engineering, patents, and devices. Gould is pointing at a status hierarchy that was also an institutional filter: what counted as real physics, who got hired, what labs got funded, which students got mentored.
"Very sharp distinction" does extra work here. It frames the divide as policed, not natural. The subtext is that applied work wasn’t simply different, it was suspect. For someone like Gould, whose career became entangled with the invention and patent wars around the laser, that suspicion had consequences. If your institution "did not deal with applied physics", you were implicitly discouraged from pursuing ideas that smelled like applications, commercialization, or technological payoff - even when those ideas were scientifically deep.
The last sentence lands like a closing door. "Columbia did not deal" reads less like a descriptive fact than an institutional personality: aloof, selective, curating an identity. Gould’s intent is to explain how a cultural posture inside elite departments shaped what people felt permitted to do, and how that posture could leave transformative inventions to develop in the margins, then get fought over later in courtrooms rather than celebrated cleanly in seminars.
"Very sharp distinction" does extra work here. It frames the divide as policed, not natural. The subtext is that applied work wasn’t simply different, it was suspect. For someone like Gould, whose career became entangled with the invention and patent wars around the laser, that suspicion had consequences. If your institution "did not deal with applied physics", you were implicitly discouraged from pursuing ideas that smelled like applications, commercialization, or technological payoff - even when those ideas were scientifically deep.
The last sentence lands like a closing door. "Columbia did not deal" reads less like a descriptive fact than an institutional personality: aloof, selective, curating an identity. Gould’s intent is to explain how a cultural posture inside elite departments shaped what people felt permitted to do, and how that posture could leave transformative inventions to develop in the margins, then get fought over later in courtrooms rather than celebrated cleanly in seminars.
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| Topic | Science |
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