获得诺贝尔奖的“徒弟”最多的物理学家

20世纪是物理学的黄金世纪.提到20世纪的物理教育大师,一般业内人士会想到汤姆孙、卢瑟福和玻尔,认为这3代师徒是最出色的物理教育家,重要的理由之一是他们培养了多名诺贝尔奖得主.事实上马克斯.玻恩创立了哥廷根物理学派,在哥廷根、在法兰克福、在爱丁堡他培养和影响了十余名年轻科学家,帮助他们获得诺贝尔奖.玻恩的成就使之当之无愧进入20世纪伟大物理教育家之前列.     

Language and Reality

The article investigates the way in which Peter Mittelstaedt has been contributing to the philosophy of physics for half a century. It is shown that he pursues a path between rationalism and empiricism in the sense of Erhard Scheibe’s philosophy of the physicists. Starting from Kant’s a priori he gives a rational reconstruction of the conceptual revolutions of 20th century physics. The central topic of his philosophy of physics is the quest for semantic self-consistency, which for quantum mechanics is a hard nut to crack.     

Planck, the Quantum, and the Historians

In late 1900, the German theoretical physicist Max Planck derived an expression for the spectrum of black-body radiation. That derivation was the first step in the introduction of quantum concepts into physics. But how did Planck think about his result in the early years of the twentieth century? Did he assume that his derivation was consistent with the continuous energies inherent in Maxwellian electrodynamics and Newtonian mechanics? Or did he see the beginnings, however tentative and uncertain, of the quantum revolution to come? Historians of physics have debated this question for over twenty years. In this article, I review that debate and, at the same time, present Planck's achievement in its historical context.     

玻恩与诺贝尔奖

马克斯·玻恩为20世纪的物理学做出了卓越的贡献,但是他在自己70余岁才获得诺贝尔奖,个中原因多有推测;另外,究竟哪些人是玻恩的诺贝尔奖提名人,也是众说纷纭.根据可靠的文献资料,对以上不可思议的问题做了详细分析,并给出了明确答案.     

The Lorenz Number and the Lorenz Gauge—Known Concepts,Unknown Physicist

Ludvig Lorenz was Denmark's first theoretical physicist of international recognition. Despite his important contributions to a broad range of experimental and theoretical physics, he generally appears as a somewhat peripheral figure in histories of late‐nineteenth‐century physics and is completely overshadowed by his near‐namesake H. A. Lorentz. Herein, a selected number of Lorenz's works is introduced with an eye on those which are still of relevance to modern physics and today eponymously associated with his name. These contributions are known as the Lorenz number, the Lorenz gauge, the Lorenz–Lorentz law or formula, and the Lorenz–Mie scattering theory.     

Mathematics, Experiments, and Theoretical Physics: The Early Days of the Sommerfeld School

Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) founded one of the most influential schools of twentieth-century theoretical physics. His favored specialty was atomic theory, and a world-wide community of physicists was introduced to this field by his legendary textbook, Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines. The names of his students read like a Who's Who of the pioneers in modern physics Peter Debye, Peter Paul Ewald, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Hans A. Bethe - to name only the most prominent. In retrospect, the success of Sommerfeld's school of modern theoretical physics tends to overshadow its less glorious beginnings. A century ago, theoretical physics was not yet considered as a distinct discipline. In this article I emphasize more the haphazard beginnings than the later achievements of Sommerfeld's school, which mirrored the state of theoretical physics before it became an independent discipline.     

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1913: The Highest Honor for the Lowest Temperatures

One century ago this year the Dutch experimental physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853–1926) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in low-temperature physics, in particular for his production of liquid helium. I trace the route to his Nobel Prize within the context of his and his colleagues’ research in his laboratory at the University of Leiden, and in light of his nominators and the nominations he received in the five years 1909–1913.     

黄昆对物理学的贡献

黄昆是晶格动力学的奠基人和权威,声子物理学科开拓者。他是多声子光跃迁和多声子无辐射跃迁理论学科的开创者,是“极化激元”概念的最早阐述者。他的姓氏也与晶格振动长波唯象方程、X光漫散射理论联系在一起。在多年离开科研第一线后,黄昆70岁还建立了半导体超晶格光学声子的“黄－朱模型”。本文简要介绍黄昆先生在科学研究领域的几项主要贡献。     

系统生物学中的物理问题

在20世纪末到21世纪初的十多年里,生命科学,特别是分子生物学发生了令世人瞩目的变化.生命科学研究飞速发展使人们相信21世纪是生命科学的世纪.与此同时,人们也越来越清楚地意识到生命科学研究的质的飞跃不可能由生物学家独立完成.数学、物理、化学、力学、信息科学在生物学研究中必将担任越来越重要的角色.文章通过介绍几个作者参与的系统生物学研究工作,探讨物理学在系统生物学中应该并能担任的角色.     

In Appreciation¶The Depth and Breadth of John Bell's Physics

This essay surveys the work of John Stewart Bell, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century. Section 1 is a brief biography, tracing his career from working-class origins and undergraduate training in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to research in accelerator and nuclear physics in the British national laboratories at Harwell and Malvern, to his profound research on elementary particle physics as a member of the Theory Group at CERN and his equally profound "hobby" of investigating the foundations of quantum mechanics. Section 2 concerns this hobby, which began in his discontent with Bohr's and Heisenberg's analyses of the measurement process. He was attracted to the program of hidden variables interpretations, but he revolutionized the foundations of quantum mechanics by a powerful negative result: that no hidden variables theory that is "local" (in a clear and well-motivated sense) can agree with all the correlations predicted by quantum mechanics regarding well-separated systems. He further deepened the foundations of quantum mechanics by penetrating conceptual analyses of results concerning measurement theory of von Neumann, de Broglie and Bohm, Gleason, Jauch and Piron, Everett, and Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber. Bell's work in particle theory (Section 3) began with a proof of the CPT theorem in his doctoral dissertation, followed by investigations of the phenomenology of CP-violating experiments. At CERN Bell investigated the commutation relations in current algebras from various standpoints. The failure of current algebra combined with partially conserved current algebra to permit the experimentally observed decay of the neutral pi-meson into two photons stimulated the discovery by Bell and Jackiw of anomalous or quantal symmetry breaking, which has numerous implications for elementary particle phenomena. Other late investigations of Bell on elementary particle physics were bound states in quantum chromodynamics (in collaboration with Bertlmann) and estimates for the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (in collaboration with de Rafael). Section 4 concerns accelerations, starting at Harwell with the algebra of strong focusing and the stability of orbits in linear accelerators and synchrotrons. At CERN he continued to contribute to accelerator physics, and with his wife Mary Bell he wrote on electron cooling and Beamstrahlung. A spectacular late achievement in accelerator physics was the demonstration (in collaboration with Leinaas) that the effective black-body radiation seen by an accelerated observer in an electromagnetic vacuum - the "Unruh effect" - had already been observed experimentally in the partial depolarization of electrons traversing circular orbits.     

物理学对微电子高新技术的推动作用

描述了物理学对微电子高新技术的推动作用,无论是从本世纪晶体管的发明到计算机的日新月异发展,或者从下个世纪的新结构半导体器件到计算机的全新变革,都充分说明了物理学的重要作用。     

暗物质的直接实验探测

暗物质研究是21世纪粒子物理、天体物理和宇宙学最重要的前沿科学课题之一.暗物质被天文学中的引力效应所观察到,但对它的存在和认识仍旧是个谜.文章主要论述了对弱作用大质量暗物质粒子(WIMP)直接探测的基本原理、各种直接探测技术、当前的实验进展和发展方向.最后给出了最近的实验物理结果.     

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: Master of Experimental Technique and Quantitative Research

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926), born a century and a half ago, was a major protagonist in the so-called Second Golden Age of Dutch Science. He devoted his career to the emerging field of low-temperature physics. His particular concern was to test the theories of his older compatriot Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837-1923) by creating a style of research that was characterized by meticulous planning, precise measurement, and constant improvement of techniques and instruments. He made numerous contributions to low-temperature physics, but I focus on his liquefaction of helium, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1913, and on his discovery of superconductivity. He became known internationally as le gentleman du zéro absolu.     

W.H.布拉格的科学生涯与科学贡献

W．H．布拉格是20世纪伟大的英国科学家,但长期以来物理学界对他的了解不够全面．本文回顾了W．H．布拉格的人生轨迹,较系统地介绍了他的科学贡献,揭示了一些令人深思的问题,对他在科学界的深远影响也作了充分肯定     

物理学和生物学(上)

20世纪物理学研究从微观领域到宏观宇宙都取得很大进展。对生物的研究已经成为新世纪物理学的重要主题。文章简要阐述了分子生物学中的一些基本概念，说明了一些有趣的问题，同时总结了作者最近在生物信息学方面的工作。     

近代物理学与核技术

核技术是本世纪最尖端技术之一．它是以１９世纪末和２０世纪发展起来的现代物理学为基础的．核技术发展如此之快，没有现代物理学的支持是不可能的．文章讨论了核技术对经济、科学、技术的影响，着重强调现代物理学的发展直接影响核技术的发展     

The Transformation of Physics from 1900 to 1945

Historians of science have analyzed in detail the conceptual transformations that gave physics its modern character in the first half of the twentieth century. Rarely provided in these narratives, however, is a feeling for the global scene of the physics community. How many publishing physicists were there around 1900? How many in 1925 or 1939? Did most physicists publish as single authors or in teams, and how did they compare with chemists or mathematicians in terms of scientific collaborations? What are the links between these disciplines? I propose to undertake such a global analysis of the trends that can be captured through a bibliometric analysis of hundreds of thousands of scientific papers and the more than one million references in them.     

关于大学物理实验教学内容与课程体系的构想

本文通过对国内外物理实验教学和教材的比较研究，以及对多年来物理实验课教改经验的总结，提出了关于面向２１世纪大学物理实验教学内容与课程体系的构想．     

Hamilton and the square root of minus one

Quaternions, objects consisting of a scalar and a vector, sound like a mysterious concept from the past. In the nineteenth century, the theory of quaternions was praised as one of the most brilliant achievements in mathematical physics. The originator of this theory, Hamilton, surely one of the greatest scientists in that area, spent about 18 years in discussing all kinds of algebraic and geometric properties of quaternions. His research was communicated to the Philosophical Magazine in three series of papers comprising a total of 29 contributions. In this commentary, these three series of papers are revisited concentrating primarily on the algebraic properties of quaternions.