{"title":"The Astrophysical Thoughts of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker","authors":"Michael Wiescher, Karlheinz Langanke","doi":"10.1007/s00016-025-00325-0","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-025-00325-0","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>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.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"27 1","pages":"26 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00016-025-00325-0.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143861157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Total Solar Eclipse of 1869 as Stimulus for Adoption of Physical-astronomy Techniques in the United States","authors":"Jennifer Lynn Bartlett, Thomas Hockey","doi":"10.1007/s00016-025-00322-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-025-00322-3","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>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.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"27 1","pages":"3 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00016-025-00322-3.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143861296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nuclear Physics and Technology in Finland from World War II to the Early Cold War","authors":"Markus Ahlskog","doi":"10.1007/s00016-025-00323-2","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-025-00323-2","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>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.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"27 1","pages":"50 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00016-025-00323-2.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143861252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Irregular Practitioners?","authors":"Climério Paulo da Silva Neto, Richard Staley","doi":"10.1007/s00016-025-00324-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-025-00324-1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"27 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143861237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constructing a Nobel Prize: The Case of Madame Curie","authors":"Matteo Leone, Nadia Robotti","doi":"10.1007/s00016-024-00320-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-024-00320-x","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>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 <i>Institut du Radium</i>). She also replaced the former pair both as an image and as a presence, eventually becoming an icon of the new physics.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"26 3-4","pages":"132 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142737311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Search for Radiation Standards and Science Diplomacy in the Interwar Period","authors":"Aske Hennelund Nielsen, Maria Rentetzi","doi":"10.1007/s00016-024-00319-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-024-00319-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper argues that international cooperation on devising radiation standards and measuring devices has been an issue not only of national concern but of binational and international conflict in the interwar period. Moreover, the production of radiation safety standards and radiation units gradually became a diplomatic process that underlined national rivalries and depended on political and diplomatic interests. As a result of this diplomatic process, early major scientific actors on radiation research lost prominence. The need to decide on radiation standards that could address medical, military and industrial concerns was therefore acute long before the 1950s and the establishment of international organizations such as the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that took the lead in regulating the uses of ionizing radiation in the postwar period.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"26 3-4","pages":"237 - 267"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00016-024-00319-4.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142737060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Significance of the Ordinary in Physics","authors":"Robert Naylor, Joseph D. Martin, Richard Staley","doi":"10.1007/s00016-024-00321-w","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-024-00321-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"26 3-4","pages":"129 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142736893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Karl George Emeléus and Physics in Belfast 1927–66","authors":"Mark McCartney","doi":"10.1007/s00016-024-00318-5","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-024-00318-5","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Karl George Emeléus (1901–1989) was educated at Cambridge and after a short period at King’s College, London, he spent the remainder of his career as lecturer (1929–33) and then professor (1933–66) of physics at Queen’s University, Belfast. At Queen’s, he set the direction of experimental research in gas discharge and plasmas for a generation and oversaw the growth of the department. He also acted as a spokesman for physics in Northern Ireland and was involved in public responses to concerns about the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy in the late 1940s and 50s. This paper summarises Emeléus’s life and work and sets it in the context of physics at Queen’s University in the mid-twentieth century.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"26 3-4","pages":"180 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00016-024-00318-5.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142737320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Value of the Einstein-Besso Manuscript","authors":"Michel Janssen","doi":"10.1007/s00016-024-00311-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-024-00311-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>On November 23, 2021, a manuscript consisting of about fifty pages of scratchpad calculations by Albert Einstein and his close friend Michele Besso sold at auction in Paris for a record $11.5 million. Most of these calculations date from 1913 and deal with the secular motion of Mercury’s perihelion. Einstein and Besso could only account for eighteen of the forty-three seconds of arc per century missing from the Newtonian account of this motion. In November 1915, drawing on this work with Besso, Einstein was able to account for all forty-three seconds. In the early 1990s, I prepared the Einstein-Besso manuscript for publication in volume four of <i>The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein</i> and wrote an essay about it for the auction catalog the first two times it changed hands, for $360,000 in 1996, for $500,000 in 2002. Rather than on the manuscript’s increasing monetary value, however, this essay focuses on its intellectual significance and its importance for my academic career.</p>","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142217525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Protest that Never Was: Silencing Political Activism at CERN Before and During the Vietnam War","authors":"Barbara Hof, Gerardo Ienna, Simone Turchetti","doi":"10.1007/s00016-024-00317-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00016-024-00317-6","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This article focuses on the history of CERN from the perspective of its staff’s political initiatives. Notwithstanding the extensive coverage that the international physics laboratory has received, historians have yet to document these campaigns in full. What follows explains this omission by focusing on provisions that muzzled the activists’ initiatives. Since 1955, staff rules and regulations elaborated by CERN managers aimed at curbing efforts to promote political campaigning in the laboratory. Designed to safeguard its special legal status as an international organization in Switzerland devoted to scientific collaborations, these provisions strengthened its public image as a “sanctuary” for pure physics. With the war in Vietnam in full swing, however, it became more difficult to bottle in political initiatives, especially as CERN staff contributed to anti-war protests and supported local solidarity groups. At this critical junction, the laboratory managers muffled campaigns targeting Nobel-prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and made it seem as if a petition against the US military strikes in Vietnam signed by its staff was never put together.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":727,"journal":{"name":"Physics in Perspective","volume":"26 3-4","pages":"211 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00016-024-00317-6.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142217526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}