PhysicsWorld tries to get to the bottom of a curious question: Why did this inner-city high school produce seven Nobel laureates?
The school, which opened in 1938, was founded by the educator Morris Meister, who believed that if a school put bright students together, it would kindle ill-defined but valuable learning processes. The school seems to have proved him right: according to the Bronx laureates, their physics learning took place mainly outside the classroom.
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At the time, the school offered only two advanced-physics courses. One was in “radio technology”, in which students built crystal radio sets, while in the “automotive physics” they took apart and reassembled an old aeroplane engine.
Neither Glashow nor Weinberg bothered with either. Far more exciting was the science-fiction club – whose members clustered around lab tables to talk about physics – and afterschool trips to the used bookstores that then populated lower Manhattan.
Particle theorist David Politzer, who shared the 2004 Nobel prize and who spoke at last month’s APS ceremony, described the school’s spirit by citing a transport strike that took place in 1966 – the year he left Bronx. The strike paralysed the city for almost two weeks and in most schools attendance plummeted; in some, nobody turned up. “[But] at Bronx Science, attendance was normal,” Politzer recalls. “We walked, bicycled and hitchhiked to school. We wouldn’t miss it!”