Physics in Perspective最新文献

We seek a new historiographical perspective on attempts to understand and improve the performance of the telescope in the first half of the seventeenth century. The invention of the telescope in the early seventeenth century presented natural philosophers, mathematicians, and practitioners with opportunities and a significant challenge. Examining contributions ranging from Galileo to Christoph Scheiner, we argue that their work exhibits different responses to the difficulty of rendering the telescope reliable, controllable, and capable of improvement despite the absence of a shared theoretical understanding of the instrument. Our paper then is a study in the dynamics of practice and theory. Throughout this period, a persistent tension existed between perspectival optics and workshop practice. Geometrical relations increasingly served as operative means for regulating and improving telescope performance as well as for explaining optical behavior. This instrumental orientation was articulated explicitly by Carlo Antonio Manzini, whose retrospective account of telescope-making procedures throws into relief the practical domain on which future physical theories of optical instruments would be based.

Among the many twentieth-century authors who have been inspired by developments in science, the American novelist and poet John Updike stands out as a fascinating example. Interested in science and its history, he was well informed by his reading of popular science books and journals. From where did he get his information? How did scientists respond to his literary works referring to science, if at all? This paper offers a critical survey of Updike’s science-related writings from the mid-1950s to his death in 2009. Rather than adopting a literary-critical approach, its focus is on the scientific aspects and in particular on those related to physics, astronomy, and cosmology. Although these themes were not essential to Updike’s literary works, neither were they merely ornamental. By locating his writings in the context of history of science they will be provided with an additional dimension not sufficiently appreciated by literary scholars.

Henri Poincaré’s Saint Louis lecture of 1904 occupies an important place in the early history of relativity, formulating the principle of relativity in general terms and presenting it as a guiding principle of mathematical physics alongside least action and energy conservation. This article reconstructs the lecture’s early publication and international dissemination through La Revue des idées, the Bulletin des sciences mathématiques, The Monist, and Poincaré’s book La valeur de la science. Drawing on library records, accession data, booksellers’ advertisements, press notices, and correspondence, it reconstructs the documentary landscape within which Albert Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper should be situated. Evidence from Einstein’s Bern milieu, including Joseph Sauter’s testimony and the possible redating of Einstein’s letter to Conrad Habicht to June 1, 1905, suggests a denser intellectual environment than simplified narratives of solitary discovery imply. Availability is not influence, but reconstructing availability is essential to assessing Einstein’s relation to Poincaré and Lorentz.

Ronald Wilfrid Gurney is one of the lesser-known research students of the Cavendish Laboratory in the mid 1920s. Gurney made significant contributions to the application of quantum mechanical tunnelling to problems related to alpha-decay from nuclei, to formation of images in photographic plates, the understanding of the origin of color-centres in salt crystals, the theory of semiconductors, and to the theory of electrochemistry and ionic solutions. He also made fundamental contributions to ballistics research. Gurney wrote a number of textbooks on fundamental and applied quantum mechanics in a distinctive intuitive and diagrammatic style which are still useful as educational resources. In addition to his scientific contributions, he travelled extensively, and before, during, and after World War II worked in the United States. During the cold war, he got entangled in the investigations of the Klaus Fuchs espionage affair and lost his security clearance and employment. During his work and travels, he interacted with many of the important figures of physics in the first half of the twentieth century. He died at the age of 54 in 1953 from a stroke. With the approach of the 100th year anniversary of quantum mechanics, it is timely to commemorate the life and contributions of this somewhat forgotten physicist.

This article, the third in a series about the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), covers the first decade of his research at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, from his return from an educational trip abroad in 1741 to the mid-1750s. Lomonosov’s major focus was on the establishment of the first Russian laboratory for the introduction of modern experimental physics and chemistry methods both to original research and education. The lab supported studies of the physics of colors, chemistry and physics of glasses and training of the Academy students. This article describes how Lomonosov, first an Adjunct Professor and then as a young Professor, fought to create the chemistry lab, and then to establish a broad program of experiments and tests there. The construction of laboratories to be used not just for research but also education only became widespread in the early 19^th century, but Lomonosov’s laboratory had a significant impact on the early development of the Academy and on Russian science.

Between 1934 and 1936, Popper wrote at least eight manuscripts on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, proposing a Gedankenexperiment based on electron-photon collision in which reconstructing the past trajectory of an electron would allow one, via momentum conservation, to predict both position and momentum of a photon with arbitrary precision, thus apparently ‘beating’ the indeterminacy relations. Popper corresponded about it with leading physicists such as Weisskopf, Heisenberg, von Weizsäcker, and Einstein, who pointed out the flaws in his reasoning. In retrospect, Popper described these efforts as a “gross mistake”. Yet Jammer (1974) suggested that this mistake may have influenced the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, while Margenau (1974) credited Popper with anticipating the later distinction between preparation and measurement. Drawing on unpublished material, this paper argues that both claims are doubtful. Popper’s thought experiment is more closely related to the 1931 Einstein-Tolman-Podolsky setup, though he reached the opposite conclusion precisely because he misunderstood the link between preparation and measurement. The same ‘mistake’, the paper concludes, also undermines the EPR-like thought experiment Popper proposed at the turn of the 1980s.

This paper reconstructs the history of Alchimia del tempo nostro, a popular science book written by the then-debutant authors Ginestra Amaldi and Laura Fermi, and published in its first edition in 1936. Alchimia was the first Italian work to introduce the emerging field of nuclear physics to a general readership. Expanded by Ginestra and republished in 1943, the second edition of the book reflects both the rapid transformation of nuclear physics and the dramatic disruption caused by the Second World War, which separated the two authors: Ginestra remained in wartime Rome with her family, while Laura, already in the United States, was on the verge of moving to Los Alamos. By drawing on previously unexplored archival sources and shedding light on the story of Alchimia, this study brings into focus the early profiles of two women of remarkable intellectual stature who have so far received limited historiographical attention. By doing so, the paper also offers a fresh perspective on the via Panisperna group.