Physics in Perspective最新文献

Why did German physicists not build an atomic bomb during the Second World War? This question has long been controversial. This essay provides a new perspective through a focus on the everyday practice of the physicists in their laboratories. The study of everyday research work has long been obscured by the question of the bomb. To this end, the research of the Viennese group in the German Uranverein, or “Uranium Club,” will be analyzed in detail. What breaks and continuities were there in everyday laboratory practice? Were the physicists able to acquire new resources? Did they at least come close to the scale of Big Science or did their research remain tied to the academic laboratory?

By the 1860s, the tendency of matter toward increasing chaos—or entropy—had become a fundamental tenet of the new science of thermodynamics. But in Victorian Britain, the ramifications of this second law of thermodynamics for a Christian conception of a progressive universe remained subject to heated ideological debate. Historians of thermodynamics have held up French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s popular science fiction as comprehensive evidence that this entropic–theological debate was widespread across disciplines, media, and cultures. I show that Flammarion’s argument has been misrepresented. Not only did Flammarion not employ entropic heat-death metaphors at all—instead evoking a hot apocalypse—but he interpreted entropy through a distinctive theology, at odds with that of British scientists. A study of Flammarion’s theology, concept of entropy, and novels exhibits how investigating influential popular works can dismantle assumptions about the geographic and religious scope of the entropic–theological debate.

This paper retraces the history of some of the women who attended the Royal Physics Institute of Via Panisperna in Rome, from its founding in 1881 until 1937. Much has been written about the so-called Via Panisperna boys; less known is the story of the girls who attended that same institute starting during the directorship of Pietro Blaserna. Nuclear physicist Edoardo Amaldi, in the typewritten notes in which he began to reconstruct the history of the Institute, was one of the first to document women scientists there. Starting with the first women who graduated in physics at the Institute, and also considering the political and institutional context, I reconstruct the stories of Nella Mortara, Laura Capon, and Ginestra Giovene. The latter two later became the wives, respectively, of Enrico Fermi and Amaldi.

Vienna today is one of the capitals of research on foundations of quantum physics. We reconstruct the development of modern physics in Vienna, with a focus on foundations of quantum mechanics (FQM), which is a sub-field of quantum mechanics. We show that the influence of Erwin Schrödinger and, in more recent years, the initiatives of Anton Zeilinger—the two main intuitive reasons—cannot alone account for today’s outstanding research landscape on FQM in Vienna. We highlight four additional factors that played a crucial role in the development of foundational research in Vienna: 1) the Viennese heritage of the cultural golden age just before World War II; 2) the long-lasting institutional connection between the faculty of physics and philosophy; 3) a rise of several initiatives that gave forum to the interplay of physics and philosophy; and 4) the influence of several external scholars in the Viennese scientific landscape. Our analysis is informed by interviews with the most pertinent scientists, a detailed survey of the relevant social networks, and review of the main primary literature.

The famous German author and playwright Bertolt Brecht lived in exile in Denmark from 1933 to 1939. During the last years of his stay, he was directly and indirectly involved with physicists at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. In the spring of 1938, he had a meeting with Christian Møller concerning his plan to write what became The Life of Galileo. Later, in the early months of 1939, Brecht became aware of and interested in the discovery of uranium fission, in part spurred by a radio broadcast with Møller and other physicists. The paper reconstructs what happened in Copenhagen and discusses how the events influenced Brecht’s writing of Galileo and his views on science and society. It also reconsiders how he was to some extent inspired by Albert Einstein and made theatrical use of the ideas of the great physicist.

A recently published letter written by Werner Heisenberg in October 1943 has been interpreted as reporting on a sudden chasm in a close relationship between Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. The interpretation is interesting because (as will be argued) it is counterintuitive. There are alternatives; for example, it could be an afterthought following extended nightly small talk, not to be taken seriously. I argue, with reference to other sources, that the long-standing friendship was complex and incongruent in many ways, yet solid. It is unlikely that this relation should be vulnerable to destruction by a single irrational incident, that did not even touch on personal commitments. The incident seems rather to be an atypical expression of frustration, with little consequence. The letter can even be interpreted as a unique expression of its author’s resentment of phraseology with roots in Nazi rhetoric.

Gaetano Spandri (1796–1859) was a “diligent scholar of the physical sciences,” a private collector and maker of scientific instruments who worked in Verona in the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in Verona, the city famous as the setting of Shakespeare’s iconic masterpiece Romeo and Juliet Spandri was primarily a physicist and astronomer, but he was also interested in meteorology and natural sciences. The main sources of information about his scientific work are handwritten papers, parts of his private correspondence, and scientific reports kept at the Verona Academy of Agriculture. For most of his life, he collaborated with the physicist Giuseppe Zamboni and was in contact with important physicists and astronomers of his time. His private apartment was equipped with a rich library, an astronomical and meteorological observatory, and a large room where he gathered a rich and important collection of scientific instruments.

The history of physics in Uruguay has long been misunderstood by the country’s historians. This article proposes a new way of considering that past, researching the career of Walter Scott Hill at the Institute of Physics of the University of the Republic of Uruguay (Udelar). By doing so, not only can we fill a gap in the history of Uruguayan science, but we can also understand how important a role the laboratory had in the country’s physics and what ramifications this had. Uruguayan physics did not develop from a university chair or an institute or some scientific society; its embryo was the laboratory at the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying, part of the Institute of Physics at Udelar, even if its subsequent development did not apparently generate further fruit.