E-36: The First Proto-Megascience Experiment at NAL

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), and Rockefeller University (New York, New York) was significant not only as a milestone in Fermilab’s history but also as a model of cooperation between the East and West at a time when Cold War tensions still ran high. An examination of the origin, operation, and resolution of E-36 and the chain of experiments it spawned reveals the complex interplay of science and politics that drove these experiments as well as seeds of the megascience paradigm that has come to dominate high energy physics research since the 1970s.     

26Th ssrl users conference

The 2004 CHESS User Meeting was held on June 18 and 19, 2004, on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The meeting included the dedication ceremony for CHESS's latest addition, G-line. G-line was also featured in this year's CHESS workshop. In order to accommodate the dedication cere-mony in the afternoon of the first day, the user meeting followed a condensed format: The directors' reports were kept to a minimum and staff reports were presented as posters within the general poster session.

The User Meeting was opened by User Committee member Lois Pollack (Cornell). The first speaker was CHESS director Sol Gruner, who presented an overview of the achievements in the past running period, in particular the new mode of dedicated CHESS operation whereby dedicated X-ray production and high energy physics (HEP) interleave use of the storage ring.     

Incompatibility of the Shuttleworth equation with Hermann’s mathematical structure of thermodynamics

We show that three independent derivations of the Shuttleworth equation, arguably the second most important equation in surface physics, are inconsistent with Hermann’s mathematical structure of thermodynamics [R. Hermann, Geometry, Physics and Systems, Marcel Dekker Inc., New York, USA, 1973 (Chapter 6)]. The possible implications of this result are discussed.     

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.     

Quenched! The ISABELLE Saga, I

The story of ISABELLE, a colliding-beam accelerator conceived in 1971, officially approved in 1978, partially constructed, and terminated in 1983, is an important episode in the history of post-World War II science in the United States.The events surrounding its planning, construction, and termination reveal much about the ambitions, strategies, and tensions of American high-energy physicists, their collaborations and rivalries, and the difficulties of funding and constructing a large scientific facility in the age of Big Science. In this article, the first of two parts, I cover the period up to the beginning of construction in 1978. I place ISABELLE in the context of the early history of colliders, outline the physics goals that motivated the machine, and describe the research and motivations behind its innovative but ultimately problematic superconducting magnet design. I cover the key technological and administrative steps that the laboratory took to get the project underway and steer it past several review committees. I also treat some of the conflicts within the laboratory, and between Brookhaven and other laboratories, especially Fermilab, that hampered the project. Robert P. Crease is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, and historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory.     

In Appreciation¶A Lifetime of Connections: Otto Herbert Schmitt, 1913 - 1998

Otto H. Schmitt was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1913. As a youth, he displayed an affinity for electrical engineering but also pursued a wide range of other interests. He applied his multi-disciplinary talents as an undergraduate and graduate student at Washington University, where he worked in three departments: physics, zoology, and mathematics. For his doctoral research, Schmitt designed and built an electronic device to mimic the propagation of action potentials along nerve fibers. His most famous invention, now called the Schmitt trigger, arose from this early research. Schmitt spent most of his career at the University of Minnesota, where he did pioneering work in biophysics and bioengineering. He also worked at national and international levels to place biophysics and bioengineering on sound institutional footings. His years at Minnesota were interrupted by World War II. During that conflict - and the initial months of the Cold War to follow - Schmitt carried out defense-related research at the Airborne Instruments Laboratory in New York. Toward the end of his career at Minnesota, Schmitt coined the term biomimetics. He died in 1998. RID="*" ID="*"Jon M. Harkness received his Ph.D. degree in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin in 1996. During the spring of 2002, he is an adjunct assistant professor of the history of medicine at the University of Minnesota.     

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.     

A Simultaneous Discovery: The Case of Johannes Stark and Antonino Lo Surdo

In 1913 the German physicist Johannes Stark (1874–1957) and the Italian physicist Antonino Lo Surdo (1880–1949)discovered virtually simultaneously and independently that hydrogen spectral lines are split into components by an external electric field. Both of their discoveries ensued from studies on the same phenomenon, the Doppler effect in canal rays, but they arose in different theoretical contexts. Stark had been working within the context of the emerging quantum theory, following a research program aimed at studying the effect of an electric field on spectral lines. Lo Surdo had been working within the context of the classical theory, and his was an accidental discovery. Both discoveries, however, played important roles in the history of physics: Starks discovery contributed to the establishment of both the old and the new quantum theories; Lo Surdos discovery led Antonio Garbasso (1871–1933)to introduce research on the quantum theory into Italian physics. Ironically, soon after their discoveries, both Stark and Lo Surdo rejected developments in modern physics and allied themselves with the political and racial programs of Hitler and Mussolini.Matteo Leone is a doctoral student in the history of science at the University of Bari, Italy;his main fields of research are the history of spectroscopy and atomic physics. Alessandro Paoletti is Curator of the Museum of the Department of Physics at the University of Genoa, Italy. Nadia Robotti is Professor of the History of Physics at the University of Genoa; her main fields of research are the history of atomic physics, the old quantum theory, and spectroscopy.     

Between Autonomy and Accommodation:The German Physical Society during the Third Reich

I first sketch the history of the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft,DPG) from its founding by six young Berlin scientists as the Physical Society of Berlin (Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin) in 1845, through its renaming as the DPG in 1899 and its rise to prominence by the beginning of the 1930s. I then turn to the history of the DPG during the Third Reich, which can be divided into two periods, from the transfer of power in Germany to the Nazis in 1933 to 1940, and from 1941 to 1945. During the first period, Johannes Stark (1874–1957), one of the leaders of the “German Physics” (Deutsche Physik) movement, attempted to gain election as the Chairman of the DPG in September 1933 but was repulsed. A period of relative autonomy of the DPG from Nazi ideology and policies ensued, which gradually was transformed into one of accommodation, until at the end of the 1938, Peter Debye (1884–1966), then Chairman of the DPG, bowed to governmental demands and Nazi activists in the DPG, introduced Nazi principles, and strongly advised the Jewish members of the DPG to withdraw from it. Debye left Germany in early 1940, and after a transitional period in which Jonathan Zenneck (1871–1959) served as Acting Chairman, Carl Ramsauer (1879–1955) was elected Chairman of the DPG in December 1940, thus opening the second period, the Ramsauer era, which lasted from 1941 until the end of the war in 1945. Ramsauer oversaw the self-coordination (Selbstgleichschaltung) of the DPG to the Nazi regime, and as an industrial physicist he led the DPG to establish ever more alliances with powerful figures in the military-industrial complex of Nazi Germany, which worked to the advantage both of Ramsauer and the DPG and to that of the Nazi regime during the course of the war. Finally, as the military defeat of Germany loomed, Ramsauer took steps aimed at insuring the survival of German physics in the postwar period. After the war, he masked the wartime activities of himself and the DPG, thereby contributing to the postwar conspiracy of silence or minimization of the Nazi past in Germany. Dieter Hoffmann is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.     

The Bifurcation Approach to Hyperbolic Geometry

The Thomas precession of relativity physics gives rise to important isometries in hyperbolic geometry that expose analogies with Euclidean geometry. These, in turn, suggest our bifurcation approach to hyperbolic geometry, according to which Euclidean geometry bifurcates into two mutually dual branches of hyperbolic geometry in its transition to non-Euclidean geometry. One of the two resulting branches turns out to be the standard hyperbolic geometry of Bolyai and Lobachevsky. The corresponding bifurcation of Newtonian mechanics in the transition to Einsteinian mechanics indicates that there are two, mutually dual, kinds of uniform accelerations. Furthermore, while current hyperbolic geometry does not use the notion of vector at all (I. M. Yaglom, Geometric Transformations III, p. 135, trans. by Abe Shenitzer, Random House, New York, 1973), our bifurcation approach exposes the elusive hyperbolic vectors, that we call gyrovectors.     

Ettore Majorana’s Course on Theoretical Physics: A Recent Discovery

We analyze in some detail the course that Ettore Majorana gave on theoretical physics at the University of Naples between January and March 1938, just prior to his mysterious disappearance. We discuss, in particular, the recently discovered Moreno Lecture Notes, in which all of Majorana’s lectures are recorded, six of which are not present in those that are preserved in the Domus Galilaeana in Pisa, Italy. Antonino Drago is a retired professor of history of physics at the University of Naples “Federico II.” Salvatore Esposito is a researcher on theoretical physics and history of physics at the University of Naples “Federico II.”     

The Physical Tourist

John Calvin (1509–1564) founded a College and Academy in Geneva in 1559, the latter of which, through the efforts of many of its scholars, was finally declared to be a genuine university, the University of Geneva, in 1872. Meanwhile, thanks to the outstanding achievements of the rich, patrician Genevan scientists, in particular during the 18th century, Geneva secured a prominent place in European learned society. With the appointment of Charles-Eugène Guye (1866–1942) to the University of Geneva in 1900, Genevan research entered resolutely into 20th-century physics, particularly relativity, and continued to gain momentum before and after the Second World War when, in 1953, Geneva was chosen as the site of one of the most prestigious scientific laboratories in the world, CERN. I sketch these developments, pointing out many of the locations where they occurred in Geneva. For an interactive map of Geneva, see the website <www.ville-ge.ch/en/cartes/>. Jan Lacki teaches history and philosophy of physics at the University of Geneva and is a member of the REHSEIS research unit of the CNRS, Paris.     

信息技术与物理学基础课程的整合及其教学实践

本文介绍了我们在信息技术与物理学基础课程教学过程的整合方面开展的一些工作及其教学实践，其中重点介绍了基于校园网的大学物理课程网络辅助教学系统的构建与教学应用；基于课堂教学的大学物理课程教学模拟软件的研制开发与教学应用；基于校园网的开放式物理实验网络选课系统的研制开发与教学应用等．     

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.     

胡乾善对物理学和中国教育的贡献

胡乾善,著名振动专家和工程力学教育家.1933年毕业于清华大学物理系,1934年留学英国伦敦大学,从事宇宙射线研究工作,1937年获得博士学位后归国.1944年改行从事机械工程研究及工程力学教育工作,为东南大学力学学科的发展做出了巨大贡献.本文着重分析胡乾善对宇宙射线研究、力学研究、教学方面的贡献,深入分析了胡乾善的学术成就及教育特色.通过对胡乾善的学术与人生经历的挖掘,为近代物理学史提供史料,并学习胡乾善的高尚品质,缅怀胡乾善先生.     

Long-range correlations in kinetic theory

It is shown that macroscopic correlations in a fluid are conserved for macroscopically long times. The equations of conservation can be written in a form independent of the density of the fluid and are therefore valid for a liquid as well as for a gas. The possibility of developing a kinetic theory of turbulence on the basis of these equations (along the lines of V. N. Zhigulev and of S. Tsugé) is indicated.The contents of this paper formed part of the Ph.D. thesis submitted by the author under the supervision of Prof. Harold Grad to the Department of Mathematics, New York University and issued as NYU-Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Technical Report MF-72, October 1973.     

Large-time behavior of solutions of initial and initial-boundary value problems of a general system of hyperbolic conservation laws

We study the asymptotic behavior of the solution of the initial and initial-boundary value problem of hyperbolic conservation laws when the initial and boundary data have bounded total variation. It is shown that the solution converges to the linear superposition of traveling waves, shock waves and rarefaction waves. The strength and speed of these waves depend only on the values of the data at infinity.Results obtained at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University while the author was a Visiting Member at the Institute; this work was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant NSF-MCS 76-07039On leave from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA     

A coherent optical feedback system for optical information processing

A unique optical feedback system for coherent optical data processing is described. With the introduction of feedback, the well-known transfer function for feedback systems is obtained in two dimensions. Operational details of the optical feedback system are given. Experimental results of system applications in image restoration, contrast control and analog computation are presented. Work was performed while the authors were at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa. Portions of this work have been presented in the 1973 Fall Meeting of the Optical Society of America, Rochester, New York. Work supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center.     

Nuclear Physics in Norway, 1933–1955

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, Norwegian nuclear scientists, engineers, and administrators were deeply split over their nation’s goals, organization, politics, and tools for research in nuclear physics. One faction was determined to build a nuclear reactor in Norway, while another fiercely opposed the reactor plans and focused on particle accelerators. The first faction comprised scientific entrepreneurs and research technologists, the second academic scientists, most of whom began their research careers in nuclear physics in the 1930s. To understand this conflict, I trace the development of nuclear research in Norway from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s, placing it within an international context. Roland Wittje is working on his habilitation thesis in the History of Science Unit at the University of Regensburg, Germany.     

六十年的继承与发展,与时俱进,精益求精——程江版《普通物理学》(第7版)改编介绍

写于20世纪50年代的《普通物理学》(程守洙、江之永主编)是我国工科物理最早的教材之一,半个多世纪来已有多次修订和改编,在重要历史时期为我国高等学校大学物理课程的教学作出积极贡献.本文从历史与文化、基础与前沿、理论与实际等诸方面评述了该教材的改编特色,得出结论:此书是一本历史悠久、不断进取且能全面体现传输知识、培养能力和提高科学素质的大学物理教材.