Physics in Perspective最新文献

This article analyzes the experiments for hail suppression by means of exploding rockets in Italy, where a remarkable national program of active defense was undertaken in the period 1950–70. The history of the trials of this technique is reconstructed in view of highlighting the methodological flaws of the entire experimental approach. A supplementary source of information is offered by about 1,600 “storm postcards”: reports sent back by farmers after single weather events. An archive of these postcards, recently collected, digitized, and analyzed for the Trentino region (northern Italy), offers an interesting glimpse into the scientific and pseudoscientific approaches to a difficult to predict and volatile phenomenon, both for farmers and for appointed experts.

Historian of physics Roger H. Stuewer (1934–2022), co-founder of Physics in Perspective, passed away on July 28, 2022. His loss is greatly felt in the discipline. To commemorate his considerable contribution to the history of physics, the editorial team at Physics in Perspective have elected to publish his autobiographical recollections, which cover both his esteemed academic career and many of his personal thoughts and reflections.

This essay analyzes the historiography of the German attempts during the Second World War to develop and harness the economic and military applications of uranium fission as well as the postwar “politics of the past.” This literature, which began immediately after the end of the war and continues to the present day, includes contributions from scientists, historians, journalists, playwrights, and other authors. The essay is divided into mostly chronological sections.

I describe aspects of my life in physics: the name I publish under, great physicists I have known, how I got into quantum foundations, what role I’ve played in it. My form is autobiographical, but my personal experience may illustrate what it was like being a physicist over the past sixty years. I offer some offbeat ways of thinking about some orthodox physics.

This paper reconstructs the process of identification and understanding of an ensemble of historic physics instruments carried out between 2021 and 2022 at the Department of Physics and Astronomy “Augusto Righi” of the University of Bologna. The ensemble of 244 instruments is part of the Collection of Physics of the University and corresponds to the main core of the nineteenth-century Cabinet of Physics of the University of Bologna. After a brief recollection of the complex history of the cabinet the paper brings into light the different aspects involved in the identification and understanding of a scientific instrument. The various challenges concern the use of the resources available, the role of the experts, the study in situ and the use of original archive sources. In addition, a contextualization of the present study in the current literature on material culture studies and history of scientific instruments will bring to light the importance of the analysis of historical and trade catalogues, both for retracing the trajectories of a specific artefact and for the study of its relationships with users, donors, collectors, previous owners, and other objects.

Research articles in all branches of modern science are crowded with the abbreviated technical terms known as acronyms, a phenomenon that was essentially unknown before World War II. Apart from an introduction to the notion of acronyms and its short history, the paper discusses from a historical perspective the connections between acronyms and eponyms in science. Moreover, it charts how acronyms and abbreviations became so common in physics and astronomy that the excessive use of them came to be considered a symptom of a contagious disease. While many science acronyms are exotic and little used, and some downright bizarre, others have become household words that in some cases are not even recognized to be acronymic constructions. The paper briefly examines the naming histories of some of these successful acronyms in physics and astronomy, among them radar, sonar, maser, laser, and pulsar.

This article seeks to explore the relation between nuclear physics and secrecy in early Cold War Europe. After World War II, nuclear physics re-emerged from the Manhattan Project as a largely classified field. Over time, the boundary between secret and unclassified information set by the United States moved due to both political and scientific developments. This shifting boundary of secrecy is taken as a place to investigate power relations in the context of Cold War Science. The Netherlands and Norway are two countries with early nuclear programs that tried to move this boundary, in part by building a joint reactor in 1951. Whereas they requested classified information from the US in 1946, their programs developed to a point where the US made requests to classify nuclear information in Europe by 1960. Between 1954 and 1960, the joint reactor program became the site of a multilateral intelligence operation. Secrecy was used as an intelligence tool to spread nuclear disinformation to the Soviet Union. This history shows how (de)classification opened and closed windows of opportunity and sheds light on the effectiveness of classification.