We consider the proposal by many scholars and by the International Astronomical Union to rename Hubble’s law as the Hubble-Lemaître law. We find the renaming questionable on historic, scientific, and philosophical grounds. From a historical perspective, we argue that the renaming presents an anachronistic interpretation of a law originally understood as an empirical relation between two observables

I sketch the history of the instrument collection in the Physics Museum of the University of Naples “Federico II” and point out specific instruments in it.

I present a guide to some of the locations and figures associated with the history of physics in Philadelphia, from colonial times to the present, including a walking tour and additional excursions. Highlights include sites related to Benjamin Franklin, discussions of the lives and work of important physicists at the University of Pennsylvania, a sketch of the early history of the Bartol Research Foundation

This is the second part of a two-part article about the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), the first facility designed and built specifically for producing and exploiting synchrotron radiation. The NSLS,a $24-million project conceived about 1970 and officially proposed in 1976, had its groundbreaking in 1978. Its construction was a key episode in Brookhaven’s history, in the transition of synchrotron

I sketch my experiences with Hans Bethe (1906–2005) as a teacher at Cornell University, beginning with my doctoral studies in 1961 and continuing with my work with him on a quantum-mechanics textbook.

This second part of my interview with Andor Frenkel focuses on my life and work in America. After arriving in New York in March 1941 and visiting relatives and friends in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, my friend Edward Teller, who had a professorship at George Washington University, invited me to his home in Arlington,Virginia, where I stayed until June while he attempted to locate a position

The development of quantum mechanics in the period 1920–1927 posed challenges to the understanding of causality and its incorporation into the new dynamics. Though aware of these challenges to the classical concepts of causality and to the conservation laws of energy and momentum, Arnold Sommerfeld and the members of his seminar never wavered in their commitment to the conservation laws because of

Linus Pauling, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, should have been a prize for any university. Yet, he was denied a position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1964. His liberal activism apparently was too much for university officials to stomach; the McCarthy period still cast a dismal shadow.

I describe the social and political framework in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in which the remigration of scientists and other scholars to East Germany occurred after the Second World War, between 1946 and 1959. Since these included only a small number of scientists, I illustrate the problems they encountered and the opportunities they were provided during their reintegration into GDR society

The energy bands of semiconductors were known only qualitatively at the time of the invention of the transistor in 1947. The real bands became known only in 1954 when Frank Herman used a combination of experimental information and W. Conyers Herring’s Orthogonalized Plane Wave method to propose essentially correct band structures for silicon and germanium. Further understanding came with better descriptions

One of the less known aspects of the work of Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) is that he was an advocate of aviation, one of the most challenging technological problems at the end of the 19th century. Boltzmann followed the work of the flight pioneers Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896), Wilhelm Kress (1836–1913), and Hiram S. Maxim (1840–1916) closely, and in a lecture in Vienna in 1894 and in a article in a

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, on July 7, 1907, and this first part of my interview with Andor Frenkel focuses on my life and work in Europe. After my elementary and secondary education I studied mathematics at the University of Budapest for two years. I went to the University of Göttingen in 1928 where I attended Max Born’s lectures on quantum mechanics, which influenced me to change from mathematics

Richard Gans (1880–1954) was appointed Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Physics of the National University of La Plata,Argentina, in 1912 and published a series of papers on quantum physics between 1915 and 1918 that marked him as the first quantum physicist in Latin America. I set Gans’s work within the context of his education and career in Germany prior to 1912 and his life

There are major problems in the history of the American and Soviet hydrogen bombs. They are associated with the Teller-Ulam and Teller-Oppenheimer controversies, and the question of whether the design of the Soviet H-bomb was an independent conception. Because of the scarcity of documentary evidence, these problems have little chance of being settled if the histories of the two are considered separately

Manhattan Engineer District documents from 1942 to early 1944 reveal that consideration of centrifugation as a means of enriching uranium-235 during World War II was more extensive than is commonly appreciated. A full-scale prototype centrifuge was fabricated and tested at near-production speeds; enrichments at close to levels expected theoretically was demonstrated with pilot-plant units; and plans

We present a neutronics study of the German B-VIII nuclear reactor, which was built in Haigerloch, Germany, between February and April 1945. We used the Monte Carlo code MCNP5 to estimate its effective nuclear-multiplication constant k eff and its corresponding neutron-multiplication factor M, its neutron energy-distribution spectrum, and its neutron-flux distribution in its central horizontal and

Josef Loschmidt (1821–1895) and Josef Stefan (1835–1893) were eminent scientists in the Institute of Physics at the University of Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century but are not well known today, as their legacies have been recognized differently by the scientific community. Loschmidt first described the structure of the benzene molecule and determined the size of air molecules

We analyze the influence of Enrico Fermi’s theory of beta decay, which he formulated in December 1933, on his experimental discovery of neutron-induced artificial radioactivity four months later, in March 1934.We discuss Gian Carlo Wick’s application of Fermi’s theory in interpreting Frédéric Joliot and Irène Curie’s discovery of alpha-particle-induced artificial radioactivity, and how Fermi was then

I re-examine the raw data of the measurements of the half-life of 210Po from the Romanian physicist Ştefania Mărăcineanu’s doctoral thesis, performed at the Institut du Radium, 1921–1923, under the supervision of Marie Curie. The half-life values reported in the thesis show relatively large divergences and a possible dependence on the (metallic) support on which the Po source was deposited. These findings

We reconstruct Enrico Fermi’s remarkable discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity in March 1934 with a focus on the experimental apparatus he used, such as the original neutron sources preserved in Italy and abroad. Special attention is paid to the role of the Radium Office of the Institute of Public Health in Rome in providing to Fermi the “radium emanation” (Radon-222) used to make his radon-beryllium

The paper is focused on the two most outstanding figures among the Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century China: Johann Adam Schall von Bell and Ferdinand Verbiest. Schall aimed to introduce the telescope into Chinese astronomy, which was traditionally based on naked-eye observation and calculation. With the advent of the Qing dynasty, he became head of the Mathematical Board and director of the

The concept of “fact” has a history. Over the past centuries, physicists have appropriated it in various ways. In this article, we compare Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein’s interpretations of the concept. Mach, like most nineteenth-century German physicists, contrasted fact and theory. He understood facts as real and complex combinations of natural events. Theories, in turn, only served to order and

Western missionaries played an important role as go-betweens, promoting communication and interaction between Europe and China in science, culture, and religion. In 1644, the Qing government appointed the Germany Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell head of the Bureau of Astronomy, placing him in charge of reforming the Chinese calendar. In the traditional calendar, in addition to dates based

The American physicist John Wheeler once told his colleague Richard Feynman that, in case of war, “it’s better to forget physics and tell the admirals and generals how to do tactical and strategic this-and-that.” This article explores the history of this-and-that distinctions between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons in the early Cold War. The idea of tactical nuclear weapons was intertwined with

As the History of Science Society, which is based in America, holds its annual meeting in Utrecht, one of the key academic centers on the European continent, one may surmise that the field has returned home. Yet, this hardly reflects how today’s world of scholarship is constituted: in the historiography of science, “provincializing Europe” has become an important theme, while the field itself, as is

The article ‘Einstein’s Gyros’ written by József Illy was originally published electronically

Einstein’s life-long effort to develop a theory that unifies gravitation and electromagnetism was not a purely theoretical enterprise. The technical environment of a gyrocompass factory triggered his search for a novel connection between the rotation of an electrically uncharged body and its magnetic field. The dimensional equality of the electric unit charge and the mass of a body multiplied by the

The concept of constants of nature originated in the late-nineteenth century and has since then increasingly occupied the minds of physicists. But are the constants truly constant? Inspired by Paul Dirac’s suggestion that the gravitational constant varies slowly in time, the question was addressed not only by physicists but also by astronomers, geologists, and paleontologists. Pascual Jordan in Germany

In the original publication of this article, the author noticed some minor errors.

Recent historiographic results in Galilean studies disclose the use of proportions, graphical representation of the kinematic variables (distance, time, speed), and the medieval double distance rule in Galileo’s reasoning; these have been characterized as Galileo’s “tools for thinking.” We assess the import of these “tools” in Galileo’s reasoning leading to the laws of fall (\(v^{2} \propto D\) and

Karl Przibram is one of the pioneers of early solid state physics in the field of the interdependence of coloration effects and luminescence in solids (crystals, minerals) induced by radiation. In 1921 Przibram discovered the effect of radio-photoluminescence, the light-stimulated phosphorescence in activated crystals induced by gamma rays. In 1926 Przibram was the first to use the term, Farbzentrum

Trained at University of Liverpool in both theoretical and experimental physics, William Band accepted in 1929 an appointment at Christian Yenching University in Beijing, China, where he established his career through the 1930s, heading the physics department and nurturing dozens of distinguished Chinese researchers in its MSc program. Despite the Japanese occupation of Beijing in summer 1937, Band

This is the third in a three-part article describing the development of the experimental program at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, from the first dreams of incisive electromagnetic probes into the structure of the nucleus through the era in which equipment was designed and constructed and a program crafted so that the long-desired experiments could begin. These developments unfolded

Against the background of the current drive toward diversity in modern scientific communities, this paper explores how a scientific practice might become more diverse by the inclusion of peripheral members. To demonstrate how peripheral members gain contributory expertise in the sciences in the absence of mentors and a readymade community, I present a case study of the Indian physicist C. V. Raman

Since the late-nineteenth century, scientists have been labeled with disciplinary fields and scientific achievements have been identified largely with heroic individuals. Reward systems such as the highly visible Nobel Prizes have reinforced such a view of science. This paper examines long-term trends in Nobel Physics awards since 1901 and asks whether the awards have registered the increasing specialization

In this paper, we analyze in a quantitative manner the changing position of Physical Review in the global field of physics, compared to other important physics journals, since the beginning of the twentieth century. This approach complements existing intellectual and institutional accounts of Physical Review’s historical evolution and offers a dynamical portrait of the global landscape of physics journals

The famous nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who defected to the USSR in 1950, was affiliated to the internationalist network called “Partisans of Peace,” founded in 1949. Later renamed the World Peace Council, it was an organization of pacifist scientists, intellectuals, and artists like Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Pablo Picasso that was similar to the Pugwash movement, but part of the Comintern (later

Lay people have a large appetite for information about scientific and technological issues that affect them, such as self-driving automobiles, gene manipulation, and climate change. However, this information must be clear and accurate if they are to use it to make informed political decisions. In 1994, the Nobel prize–winning physicist Philip W. Anderson used a newspaper essay to convey his concerns

It is well known that, following the emergence of the first evidence for an expanding universe, Albert Einstein banished the cosmological constant term from his cosmology. Indeed, he is reputed to have labelled the term, originally introduced to the field equations of general relativity in 1917 in order to predict a static universe, his “biggest blunder.” However, serious doubts about this reported

This article, the second in a series about the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), traces his education from his arrival in Moscow in 1731 to study at the Slavic-Greco-Latin Academy, through his admission to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1736, to his trip abroad to complete his educational studies from 1736 to 1741. Lomonosov’s story during this time opens a vista on the introduction

Maxwell’s celebrated electromagnetic theory of light dates from 1865. Two years later, without appealing to the ether as a carrier of light waves, the Danish physicist Ludvig Lorenz (1829–1891) independently published another electrical theory of light based on optical equations and the novel idea of retarded potentials. In spite of resting on a very different conceptual foundation, Lorenz’s theory

In Einstein’s later years, from the late 1920s onward, his reputation in the physics community as an innovator had faded as he pursued increasingly unrealistic unified field theories. Yet from the perspective of the press, his image and ideas were still marketable. We will see how his various attempts to craft a unified field theory generated numerous headlines, despite their lack of experimental evidence

The gradual emergence of a science of hydrostatics during the course of the seventeenth century is testament to the fact that a technical concept of pressure that was up to the task was far from obvious. The first published version of a theory of hydrostatics containing the essentials of the modern theory appeared in book 2 of Isaac Newton’s Principia. Newton derived the propositions of hydrostatics

The fiftieth anniversary year of Brookhaven National Laboratory was momentous, but for reasons other than celebrating its scientific accomplishments. Legacy environmental contamination, community unrest, politics, and internal Department of Energy issues dominated the year. It was the early days of perhaps the most turbulent time in the lab’s history. The consequences resulted in significant changes

This is the second in a three-part article describing the development of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility’s experimental program, from the first dreams of incisive electromagnetic probes into the structure of the nucleus through the era in which equipment was designed and constructed and a program crafted so that the long-desired experiments could begin. These developments unfolded

In the early 1960s, a PhD student in physics, Costas Papaliolios, designed a simple—and playful—system of Polaroid polarizer filters with a specific goal in mind: explaining the core principles behind Julian Schwinger’s quantum mechanical measurement algebra, developed at Harvard in the late 1940s and based on the Stern-Gerlach experiment confirming the quantization of electron spin. Papaliolios dubbed

The carbon cycle, or Bethe-Weizsäcker cycle, plays an important role in astrophysics as one of the most important energy sources for quiescent and explosive hydrogen burning in stars. This paper presents the intellectual and historical background of the idea of the correlation between stellar energy production and the synthesis of the chemical elements in stars on the example of this cycle. In particular

In 2016 the LIGO-Virgo collaboration announced “the first direct detection of gravitational waves.” This was to distinguish their result from the indirect observation of Russell Hulse, Joel Weisberg, and Joseph Taylor, which used the decrease in the period of a binary pulsar to “establish, with a high degree of confidence the existence of gravitational radiation as predicted by general relativity.”

This article chronicles the most recent history of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) located in Hamburg, Germany, with particular emphasis on how this national laboratory founded for accelerator-based particle physics shifted its research program toward multi-disciplinary photon science. Synchrotron radiation became DESY’s central experimental research program through a series of changes

With the foundation of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society in April 1959, plasma physics was presented as the general study of ionized gases. This paper investigates the degree to which plasma physics, during its first decade, established a community of interrelated specialties, one that brought together work in gaseous electronics, astrophysics, controlled thermonuclear

The development of superconducting wire and cable in the late twentieth century enabled high-field magnets and thus much higher beam-collision energies in accelerators. These higher collision energies have allowed experimentalists to probe further into the structure of matter at the most fundamental, subatomic level. The behavior of the early universe, where these high energies prevailed, and its evolution

Electrostatic accelerators have emerged as a major tool in research and industry in the second half of the twentieth century. In particular in low energy nuclear physics they have been essential for addressing a number of critical research questions from nuclear structure to nuclear astrophysics. This article describes this development on the example of a single machine which has been used for nearly

Galileo’s early inquiries on motion and free fall in Pisa (1588–1592) can be regarded as a case study of multiple knowledge transfer at the very basic roots of modern mechanics. The treatise De motu, unpublished until 1890, is an original but unsuccessful attempt to go beyond Aristotelian physics by extending Archimedean hydrostatics to the dynamics of natural motion and reappraising the late-medieval

This paper describes the life and scientific development of Arthur E. Haas, from his early career as young, ambitious Jewish-Austrian scientist at the University of Vienna to his later career in exile at the University of Notre Dame. Haas is known for his early contributions to quantum physics and as the author of several textbooks on topics of modern physics. During the last decade of his life, he

We assess the scientific value of Oppenheimer’s research on black holes in order to explain its neglect by the scientific community, and even by Oppenheimer himself. Looking closely at the scientific culture and conceptual belief system of the 1930s, the present article seeks to supplement the existing literature by enriching the explanations and complicating the guiding questions. We suggest a rereading

E-36, an experiment on small-angle proton-proton scattering, began testing equipment at the National Accelerator Laboratory (NAL) using a newly achieved 100 GeV proton beam on February 12, 1972, marking the beginning of NAL’s experimental program. This experiment, which drew collaborators from NAL, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, USSR), the University of Rochester (Rochester, New York)

In 1919, A. C. D. Crommelin and C. R. Davidson, British astronomers from the Greenwich Observatory in England, passed by Amazonia on their Brazilian journey aiming to measure the bending of stars' light rays during the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, and thereby put the theory of general relativity to the test. In the context of Crommelin’s and Davidson’s visit, we discuss how Amazonia was introduced

This is the first in a three-part article describing the development of the experimental program at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, from the first dreams of incisive electromagnetic probes into the structure of the nucleus through the era in which equipment was designed and constructed and a program crafted so that the long-desired experiments could begin. Part 1, which is presented

The pressures of politics, the desire to be first in innovation, moral convictions, and the potential dangers of error are all factors that have long been at work in the history of science and technology. Every so often, the need to reach a result may require leaving out a few steps here and there. Historians think and argue best through stories, so what follows are several tales, each of which exemplifies

What powered Einstein’s discoveries? Was it asking naïve questions, stubbornly? Was it a mischievous urge to break rules? Was it the destructive power of operational thinking? It was none of these. Rather, Einstein made his discoveries through lengthy, mundane investigations, pursued with tenacity and discipline. We have been led to think otherwise in part through Einstein’s brilliance at recounting