Physics in Perspective最新文献

Albert Einstein’s choice not to wear socks reflected his personal experience, yet also became a path of nonconformism many others took. The real issue was going barefoot, with all that meant in terms of social convention. In the 1940s, Einstein adopted the khakis and sweatshirts of young Americans, who in their turn began wearing shoes without socks in the 1950s. This “Ivy” or “preppy” style was an amalgam of conformism and rebellion that reflected a larger search for new personal freedom. The reactions to this style in Japan as well as the US illuminate the wider resonance of Einstein’s ambivalence about acceding to social norms that went against his own needs. The resultant story interweaves Einstein’s personal and medical history, stylish hedonists expanding their pleasures, veterans returning to school after the war, and young people trying to reconcile rebellion with submission.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker published two important papers on topics of nuclear astrophysics in 1937 and 1938 before he turned his attention elsewhere motivated by the discovery of fission and the outbreak of war in 1939. It seems, however, that he continued to actively think about issues related to astrophysics, namely the discussion and role of neutron stars and cosmology. Both are contemporary topics today. This paper presents the development of Weizsäcker’s thoughts in the years between 1935 and 1945, making use of his personal notes and letters.

In the United States, techniques that would one day be called astrophysical were applied later than elsewhere and comparatively suddenly. Their entry into US main-stream astronomy was motivated by a quasi-stochastic phenomenon: a total eclipse of the Sun visible between the contiguous borders of that country. In reaction to the upcoming event, the US Nautical Almanac Office in particular invested time, workforce, and a great deal of money into the measurements of physical astronomy, especially spectroscopy. This occurred although none of its employees had ever expressed—at least, in writing—expertise or even interest in the subject beforehand. Once adopted, physical astronomy, and the investigations it enabled, moved slowly, but steadily, into the mainstream of American astronomy despite objections from traditionalists. In the twenty-first century, spectroscopy and other physical astronomy techniques are essential tools for all astronomers.

In Finland, as elsewhere, the emergence of nuclear energy as a viable technology in the 1930s led to strong cross connections between nuclear physics and the concurrent politics. Lennart Simons from the University of Helsinki was the only internationally recognized nuclear physicist in Finland, but when the Finnish atomic energy initiative was created in 1955, Simons was completely sidelined from the investments into research on nuclear energy technology, although he continued to be the leading person in basic nuclear physics. In this article I discuss the Cold War political tensions in Finland and the long term effects of these internal disputes within Finnish nuclear science on its research structures.

On December 10, 1911, Marie Curie received her second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry, after the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, half of which went to Marie and her husband Pierre and the other half to Henri Becquerel. If we analyze Marie Curie’s scientific work from her husband’s death in 1906 until 1911, we find no particular discovery that deserved a second Nobel Prize. However, the reasons that led to this second prize are to be found in what Curie constructed around the element radium, and how she managed to make the Curie couple survive and take its place. Marie Curie took the place of the former couple both scientifically and institutionally (for example, by obtaining the chair at the Sorbonne) and through great achievements (for example, the Institut du Radium). She also replaced the former pair both as an image and as a presence, eventually becoming an icon of the new physics.