Physics in Perspective最新文献

In this paper, we employ Ian Hacking’s insight that “unity” has a double meaning, singleness and harmonious integration, to revisit a major episode from the recent history of CERN: the UA1 and UA2 experiments in the early 1980s, which led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons. CERN is a complex institution, where diverse groups are called upon to cooperate. We argue that this lack of unity, in the first sense of the term, is counterbalanced by specific mechanisms of integration, so that CERN achieves its standing as a unified organization. The UA1/UA2 episode highlights this interplay between unity and disunity. The UA2 experiment was designed and carried out in order to confirm the validity of the results obtained by UA1. The two experimental teams, working independently and with different mentalities, built separate detectors and refrained from systematically sharing their data. This gave rise to strong antagonisms and diametrically opposed opinions over what conclusions could legitimately be drawn from the resulting data. Our analysis focuses on the mechanisms which compensated for that disunity and eventually led to a unified consensus between UA1 and UA2.

Professors of physics in nineteenth-century America had two options for procuring the apparatus that they needed to demonstrate the phenomena of physics to their students. Some apparatus was available from makers and dealers in Europe, mostly in France (for optical apparatus) and Germany. A few teachers, such as Ebenezer Snell of Amherst, made some of their own apparatus. The rest of the instruments came from the fledgling North American apparatus industry, based in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and toward the end of the century, Chicago. In this article, I will discuss apparatus made by Chamberlain, Wightman, Davis, Ritchie, Pike and Ritchie, Queen, and then a few Chicago companies, and will give examples of some of their products. Toward the end of the century, a few colleges decided that the making of physics apparatus was a key adjunct of the experience of learning physics, and I will give some examples.

An interesting, yet unknown episode concerning the effective permeation of the scientific revolution in eighteenth-century Kingdom of Naples (and Italy more generally) is recounted. The intriguing story of James Watt’s steam engine, prepared to serve a Royal Estate of the King of Naples in Carditello, reveals a fascinating piece of the history of that kingdom, as well as an unknown step in the history of Watt’s steam engine, whose final entrepreneurial success for the celebrated Boulton & Watt company was a direct consequence. This story reveals that, contrary to what claimed in the literature, the first introduction in Italy of the most important technological innovation of the eighteenth century did not take place with the construction of the first steamship of the Mediterranean Sea, but rather thirty years before that, thanks to the incomparable work of Giuseppe Saverio Poli, a leading scholar and an influential figure in the Kingdom of Naples. The tragic epilogue of Poli’s engine accounts for its vanishing from historical memory.

The discussion between California astronomers Harlow Shapley of Mount Wilson Observatory and Heber Doust Curtis of Lick Observatory during the 1920 NAS meeting in Washington, DC, is now a centennial vestige of early twentieth-century scientists’ efforts to map the universe. Historians have reconstructed that evening session using surviving archives (such as the formal accounts published in the Bulletin of the National Research Council in 1921), which could have contributed to a romanticized version of the event. Nevertheless, the repercussions of the event in the press have been overlooked as a source of information. On the day following the session, newspapers from all over the country covered the news on a debate on “the size of the universe” including the question of the existence of other galaxies. They used metaphors, figures, and quotes from the lecturers and the attendees, reinforcing the rivalry between the Lick and Mount Wilson observatories, with the goal of stirring the imagination of the American public, connecting the existence of other galaxies to pluralist debates. The myth of the debate may not have been based solely on the Bulletin papers; it is a complex process, which involves the media’s coverage of the event (from journalists’ testimonies in the newspapers articles to public perception).

In the continuing spirit of narrowing the gap between the “two cultures,” this essay illustrates, quite literally through representative works of Western art, the striking parallels between the visual arts and the discoveries made during the Scientific Revolution, the period between Copernicus’s 1543 De revolutionibus and Newton’s 1687 Principia when the foundations of modern science swept away the scientific heritage of the ancient and medieval worldviews, a period that, though underrepresented in art–science studies, marked the birth of the modern mind and, indeed, the modern world.