Berkeley and Its Physics Heritage

I first sketch the settlement of Berkeley, California, the founding of the University of California at Berkeley, and the origin of its Department of Physics. I then discuss the pivotal role that Ernest O. Lawrence (1901–1958) and his invention and subsequent development of the cyclotron played in physics at Berkeley after his arrival there in 1928 through the Second World War and beyond. I close by commenting on the Lawrence Hall of Science, the educational center and science museum conceived as a living memorial to Lawrence.     

Fritz Reiche and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars

I discuss the family background and early life of the German theoretical physicist Fritz Reiche (1883–1969) in Berlin; his higher education at the University of Berlin under Max Planck (1858–1947); his subsequent work at the University of Breslau with Otto Lummer (1860–1925); his return to Berlin in 1911, where he completed his Habilitation thesis in 1913, married Bertha Ochs the following year, became a friend of Albert Einstein (1879–1955), and worked during and immediately after the Great War. In 1921 he was appointed as ordentlicher Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Breslau and worked there until he was dismissed in 1933. He spent the academic year 1934–1935 as a visiting professor at the German University in Prague and then returned to Berlin, where he remained until, with the crucial help of his friend Rudolf Ladenburg (1882–1952) and vital assistance of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, he, his wife Bertha, and their daughter Eve were able to emigrate to the United States in 1941 (their son Hans had already emigrated to England in 1939).From 1941–1946 he held appointments at the New School for Social Research in New York, the City College of New York, and Union College in Schenectady, New York, and then was appointed as an Adjunct Professor of Physics at New York University, where his contract was renewed year-by-year until his retirement in 1958.     

Dick Crane��s California Days

Horace Richard Crane (1907–2007) was born and educated in California. His childhood was full of activities that helped him become an outstanding experimental physicist. As a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (1930–1934), he had the good fortune to work with Charles C. Lauritsen (1892–1968) just as he introduced accelerator-based nuclear physics to Caltech. They shared the euphoric excitement of opening up a new field with simple, ingenious apparatus and experiments. This work prepared Crane for his career at the University of Michigan (1935–1973) where in the 1950s, after making the first measurement of the electron’s magnetic moment, he devised the g−2 technique and made the first measurement of the anomaly in the electron’s magnetic moment. A man of direct, almost laconic style, he made lasting contributions to the exposition of physics to the general public and to its teaching in high schools, community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities. I tell how he became a physicist and describe some of his early achievements.     

A Conversation with Valentine L.Telegdi – Part II

In this wide-ranging and anecdotal interview, the Hungarian experimental physicist Valentine L. Telegdi, who died on April 8, 2006, offers recollections of Enrico Fermi and Gregor Wentzel in the early 1950s at the University of Chicago. He recalls the discovery of quarks in 1963 independently by Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech and George Zweig at CERN. Comments on the establishment of the Erice summer school. Describes his work on the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (the “g-minus-2” experiment) with Richard Garwin at CERN. Recalls the colloquium given at the ETH (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in the late 1940s by Richard Feynman. Recalls his 1956 sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study; recollections of John Archibald Wheeler. Comments on the decline of physics at the University of Chicago after Fermi’s death (1954) and the switchover from liberal military funding to the more cumbersome NSF grants process; contrasts that with the generosity of the ETH. Comments on his early days at Chicago and his longstanding friendship with Murph [Marvin L.] and Mildred Goldberger. Recalls his three-month stay at Bristol University in 1947 while still a graduate student at ETH and his friendship with Richard Dalitz. Comments on Stephen Hawking. Recollections of P.A.M.Dirac.Comments on Jerome Friedman, Richard Taylor,and Henry Kendall; on Nobel Prizes and the reason for Arnold Sommerfeld’s failure to receive one. Recalls receiving the Wolf Prize in 1991 (along with Maurice Goldhaber) and an honorary degree the same year from the University of Chicago.     

A Physicist for All Seasons: Part II

The second part of this interview covers Frank Oppenheimer’s move to the University of California at Berkeley and wartime work at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the electromagnetic-separation plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at Los Alamos, New Mexico (1941–1945); his postwar research at Berkeley (1945–1947); his appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1947 and firing two years later after being required to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee; his decade as a rancher in Colorado (1949–1959) and high-school science teacher toward the end of this period; his research at the University of Colorado in Boulder after 1959; his year as a Guggenheim Fellow at University College London in 1965; and his founding of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. California, in 1969. He also discusses his wartime relations with his older brother Robert and postwar events in Robert’s life, including his Hearings before the Personnel Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.     

A Conversation with William A. Fowler – Part I

Nobel laureate William A. Fowler recalls his early education in physics; his part in the history of nuclear physics at the California Institute of Technology in the 1930s; parallel efforts elsewhere, particularly at Berkeley and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington,D.C.; his contacts with J. Robert Oppenheimer; and his work with Charles C. Lauritsen and Tommy Lauritsen before and after World War II.John Greenberg received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin and was Caltech research fellow in history from 1980–1984. The Editors were saddened to learn that he died while this interview was in press. Requests for reprints may be directed to Judith R. Goodstein, Institute Archives 015A-74, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125 USA; e-mail: jrg@caltech.edu.     

Paul Ehrenfest’s Rough Road to Leiden: A Physicist’s Search for a Position, 1904–1912

Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) received his Ph.D. degree at the University of Vienna in 1904 and moved with his wife and young daughter to St. Petersburg in 1907, where he remained until he succeeded Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928) in the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Leiden in 1912. Drawing upon Ehrenfest’s correspondence of the period, we first examine Ehrenfest’s difficult and insecure years in St. Petersburg and then discuss his unsuccessful attempts to obtain a position elsewhere before he was appointed as Lorentz’s successor in Leiden. Pim Huijnen is writing a doctoral dissertation in history; the present paper is based upon his Master’s Thesis, “‘Die Grenze des Pathologischen’: Het leven van fysicus Paul Ehrenfest, 1904–1912,” University of Groningen, 2003. A.J.Kox is Pieter Zeeman Professor of History of Physics at the University of Amsterdam.     

From Frontiersman to Physicist

This interview covers Robert Rathbun Wilson's life from his early years in Frontier, Wyoming, through his graduate studies in physics in Ernest O. Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.     

Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks

The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century. One consequence of the earliest of these disaster scenarios was that the authors of a 1993 article in Physics Today who reviewed the experiments that had been carried out at the Bevalac at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory were placed on the FBI’s Unabomber watch list. Later, concerns that experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory might create mini black holes or nuggets of stable strange quark matter resulted in a flurry of articles in the popular press. I discuss this history, as well as Richard A. Posner’s provocative analysis and recommendations on how to deal with such scientific risks. I conclude that better communication between scientists and nonscientists would serve to assuage unreasonable fears and focus attention on truly serious potential threats to humankind. Joseph I. Kapusta: Joseph I. Kapusta received his Ph.D. degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978 and has been on the faculty of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota since 1982. He is the author of over 150 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings and of Finite Temperature Field Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1989; second edition with Charles Gale, 2006).     

Richard Gans: The First Quantum Physicist in Latin America

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 and work in Argentina until 1925, as well as the foundation of the Institute of Physics of the National University of La Plata in 1906–1909 and its subsequent development by Emil Bose (1874–1911). I conclude by commenting on Gans’s life after he returned to Germany in 1925 and then immigrated once again to Argentina in 1947.     

Exciton dispersion in silicon nanostructures formed by intense,ultra-fast electronic excitation

The intense, ultra-fast electronic excitation of clean silicon (100)–(2×1) surfaces leads to the formation of silicon nanostructures embedded in silicon, which photoluminesce in the yellow-green (∼2-eV band gap). The silicon surfaces were irradiated with slow, highly charged ions (e.g. Xe⁴⁴⁺ and Au⁵³⁺) to produce the ultra-fast electronic excitation. The observation of excitonic features in the luminescence from these nanostructures has recently been reported. In this paper we report the dispersion of the excitonic features with laser excitation energy. A phonon-scattering process is proposed to explain the observed dispersion. Received: 2 October 2001 / Accepted: 18 July 2002 / Published online: 25 October 2002 RID="*" ID="*"Corresponding author. Fax: +1-925/423-7040, E-mail: Hamza1@llnl.gov RID="**" ID="**"Present address: University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94 720, USA     

National school on Neutron and X‐ray scattering alumni presentations

The 4th joint Stanford–Berkeley summer school on synchrotron radiation and its applications in physical science was held June 12–17, 2005, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The Stanford–Berkeley summer school is jointly organized by Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL). Since 2001, Anders Nilsson (Stanford/SSRL) and Dave Attwood (UC Berkeley) have been the organizers of this annual weeklong summer school, which alternates each year between Stanford and Berkeley. The summer school provides lecture programs on synchrotron radiation and its broad range of scientific applications in the physical science as well as visits to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory and the Advanced Light Source (ALS), where the students also have the opportunity to experience a beam line.     

Bruno Rossi and the Racial Laws of Fascist Italy

Bruno Rossi (1905–1993), one of the giants of 20th-century physics, was a pioneer in cosmic-ray physics and virtually every other aspect of high-energy astrophysics. His scientific career began at the University of Florence in 1928 and continued at the University of Padua until 1938, when the Fascist anti-Semitic racial laws were passed in Italy. He was dismissed from his professorship and was forced to emigrate, as described in unpublished letters and documents that display the international character of physics and physicists. His young bride Nora Lombroso, his love of physics, and the solidarity of the physics community gave him the courage to begin a new life in Copenhagen, Manchester, and in the New World at the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Los Alamos, and after the Second World War at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he became the center of a worldwide research network.     

Spring school on magnetic properties of condensed matter

The sixth joint Stanford-Berkeley summer school on synchrotron radiation and its applications in physical science was held on August 17?22, 2008, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The Stanford-Berkeley summer school is jointly organized by the Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL). Anders Nilsson (Stanford) and Dave Attwood (Berkeley) have been the organizers of this one-week summer school since 2001. It alternates between Stanford and Berkeley. The summer school provides lecture programs on synchrotron radiation and its broad range of scientific applications in the physical science, visits to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource and the Advanced Light Source, where the students also have the opportunity to join a beamline. The program is designed to introduce students and postdocs to the fundamental properties of synchrotron radiation and how to understand and use spectroscopic, scattering and microscopy techniques in various scientific applications. Particular emphasis is given to examples from physics, chemistry, and material science.     

In Memoriam

I sketch the rich life and multifaceted work of Philip Morrison (1915–2005), from his early life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and higher education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley, to his contributions to the Manhattan Project, his research at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after the war, his subsequent political activity on behalf of nuclear disarmament, his role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and his enormous influence as an educator, public speaker, and writer. A.P. French is Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.     

Edward Gerjuoy: From Physics to Law and Back Again

Theoretical physicist Edward Gerjuoy discusses his family background, elementary and secondary education in Brooklyn, New York, undergraduate studies at City College, graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, research during World War II, and subsequent career at the University of Southern California, New York University, the General Atomics Laboratory, the Radio Corporation of America, and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as his work as a lawyer and service as a judge on the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board in Pittsburgh.     

A Conversation with William A. Fowler – Part II

Physicist William A.Fowler initiated an experimental program in nuclear astrophysics after World War II. He recalls here the Steady State versus Big Bang controversy and his celebrated collaboration with Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge on nucleosynthesis in stars. He also comments on the shift away from nuclear physics in universities to large accelerators and national laboratories.John Greenberg received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin and was Caltech research fellow in history from 1980–1984. The Editors were saddened to learn that he died while this interview was in press. Requests for reprints may be directed to Judith R. Goodstein, Institute Archives 015A-74, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125 USA; e-mail: jrg@caltech.edu.     

Charles C. Lauritsen: A Reasonable Man in an Unreasonable World

Charles C. Lauritsen (1891-1968) was a leading American experimental nuclear physicist and government advisor. He emigrated from Denmark to the United States in 1916 with his wife and baby. In 1926 he talked his way into graduate study at Caltech. Within four years he completed a physics Ph.D. degree, built the worlds highest voltage X-ray tube, and became a Caltech faculty member and director of the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory - founded to treat cancers with his X-ray tube. Converting one of his tubes into a particle accelerator, he became a nuclear physicist. During World War II he established and ran a large program for developing rocket munitions. After the war he advised government agencies on weapons development and research funding. He opposed the U.S. decision to develop the H-bomb. I discuss here his achievements, character, leadership, and the difficulties of science advising - especially evident in Project Vista.     

Poincaré’s Relativistic Physics: Its Origins and Nature

Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) developed a relativistic physics by elevating the empirical inability to detect absolute motion, or motion relative to the ether, to the principle of relativity, and its mathematics ensured that it would be compatible with that principle. Although Poincaré’s aim and theory were similar to those of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) in creating his special theory of relativity, Poincaré’s relativistic physics should not be seen as an attempt to achieve Einstein’s theory but as an independent endeavor. Poincaré was led to advance the principle of relativity as a consequence of his reflections on late nineteenth-century electrodynamics; of his conviction that physics should be formulated as a physics of principles; of his conventionalistic arguments on the nature of time and its measurement; and of his knowledge of the experimental failure to detect absolute motion. The nonrelativistic theory of electrodynamics of Hendrik A.Lorentz (1853–1928) of 1904 provided the means for Poincaré to elaborate a relativistic physics that embraced all known physical forces, including that of gravitation. Poincaré did not assume any dynamical explanation of the Lorentz transformation, which followed from the principle of relativity, and he did not seek to dismiss classical concepts, such as that of the ether, in his new relativistic physics. Shaul Katzir teaches in the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Bar Ilan University.