Synopsis

This course of four workshops will address ethical issues that arise in doing physics.  The format will be a moderated discussion of ethical problems that arise in four areas as follows:

Workshop 1 – military research

Workshop 2 – the politics of science and government funding policy 

Workshop 3 – the use and abuse of data   

Workshop 4 – intellectual property and allocation of credit

Broadly speaking the first two workshops are concerned with the responsible conduct of research and the second two with the applications of physics.  My intention is to run a fairly open plan course, and I am willing to introduce topics of particular interest to participants.  That said, the default topics are as follows:

Workshop 1

For this first ethics in physics workshop I will introduce some of the ethical questions that arise in doing military research and indicate alternatives to military research.  My main resources are publications of Scientists for Global Responsibility.  Three in particular are of interest and are available as handouts on the TIS:

Soldiers in the Laboratory

More Soldiers in the Laboratory

Behind Closed Doors

Workshop 2

This workshop will look at the politics of science and the origins of the government's funding policy.  The discussion will focus on the question of how to balance the funding of pure basic research with the government’s priority for wealth creation.  This is a particularly sensitive issue for the most basic fields of research such as particle physics and astronomy.

The issues arise in a classic debate in the Journal Minerva Volume 1, 1962:

Michael Polanyi, “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” pp. 54-73.

Alvin Weinberg, “Criteria for Scientific Choice” pp. 159-171.

Workshop 3

To compare Robert Millikan’s dubious presentation of data in his 1913 paper, "On the elementary Electrical Charge and the Avogadro Constant," [The Physical Review Series II, Volume II, No. 2, (1913), pp. 109-143] and the more notorious presentation of data by Jan Hendrick Schön.  The Millikan case is available at:

http://www.onlineethics.org/Education/precollege/scienceclass/sectone/cs2.aspx

Workshop 4

Problems of intellectual property range from straightforward plagiarism to industrial espionage.  At a more subtle level, there are problems of how credit is shared out among members of a group working on a research project.  We will discuss two cases: the case of Rosalind Franklin and her contribution to our knowledge of the chemical structure of DNA, and the case of Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the discovery of pulsars.  In each case there is still a range of opinions concerning the distribution of credit, and these two cases provide good examples of the difficulties that can be encountered in fairly sharing the credit for discoveries.  The case of Rosalind Franklin is available at:

http://www.onlineethics.org/Education/precollege/scienceclass/sectone/cs4.aspx