bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
APS–AAPT return to New York
Authors: Dodd Patricia
Published: April 2009

Discussion of physics in international education, consideration of the professional careers of women in physics and celebration of 50 years of electron spin will highlight the annual joint meeting of The American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers. The so-called “New York meeting” will take place during 2–5 February, and the headquarters of the meeting will be the New York Hilton. Advance registration will take place on Sunday, 1 February from 5:00 to 10:00 pm, and regular registration will begin at 8:30 am on Monday, 2 February.
Promising areas of research in the computer industry
Authors: Branscomb Lewis M.
Published: April 2009

“After 25 years of extraordinary progress, the computer industry is ready to enter its infancy.” So wrote John Pierce of Cal Tech (and formerly of Bell Labs), and his comment emphasizes the challenge of the prospect we face in computer science. Rather than complacently reviewing the progress already made, we must look ahead toward the developments we can expect in the future. In this short article I can do no more than touch on a few of the highlights; what follows does not claim to be a complete review, but it may serve to demonstrate that the infant is healthy and can look forward to many years of growth and development.
Neutrons and x rays probe TTF–TCNQ structure
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Interest in the organic conductor, TTF–TCNQ, has remained high since the report three years ago by some Penn experimenters that they had observed superconducting fluctuations in the material around 60 K. By now it is generally believed that TTF–TCNQ is not showing superconducting behavior. Nevertheless TTF–TCNQ and related substances continue to be enthusiastically studied because of their essentially one-dimensional behavior and because of strong evidence for charge-density waves.
Experiments at Stanford approach a free-electron laser
Authors: Rothenberg Marian S.
Published: April 2009

Great expectations for a powerful, high-resolution laser, completely tunable from the infrared through the vacuum ultraviolet region, have been raised by some recent work at Stanford University. Experiments there show that a “free-electron laser”—one in which free electrons stimulate the emission of magnetic bremsstrahlung in a spatially periodic transverse magnetic field—could be a practical device.
Progress report on the VLA
Authors: Bennett Floyd C.
Published: April 2009

Work goes on at the Very Large Array telescope project's site on the arid Plains of San Augustin, fifty miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. A $2.9-million subcontract for the third phase of construction of the giant radio telescope has been awarded to the Burn Construction Company.
Scientists with a secret
Authors: Weart Spencer R.
Published: April 2009

What are physicists to do if they make a discovery that promises to transform industry but also threatens to revolutionize warfare? Should they investigate the phenomenon within their traditions of free and open inquiry or keep the deadly secret to themselves? This is the dilemma that was faced by several groups of physicists who studied uranium fission in 1939 and 1940. In the spring of 1939 one group, foreseeing the unprecedented power of nuclear weapons, made a concerted attempt to restrict knowledge of chain reactions. But it was not until over a year later that censorship—imposed by the community of physicists on itself—became fairly complete.
Helium three
Authors: Wheatley John C.
Published: April 2009

The past two decades have seen great progress in our understanding of the properties of condensed helium 3. Research on He3 in our lab (see figure 1 for its modern form) began in 1958. At that time the properties of the more abundant isotope, helium 4, were rather well known: A phase transition at about 2 K transforms it from a normal liquid to a superfluid, a liquid that under some conditions will flow without viscous drag. The explanation for this behavior is rooted in concepts from the condensation of an ideal Bose–Einstein gas. But He3 obeys Fermi–Dirac statistics; would it show any likeness to a Fermi gas or liquid? Would it also exhibit a transition to superfluidity?
Central peaks due to microdomains, impurities or…?
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Although in 1969 certain structural phase transitions were predicted to have a so-called “central peak,” the experimental observations of the phenomenon show it to be more widespread than originally predicted. By now central peaks have been found in insulators, metals, materials with high transition temperatures, materials with low transition temperatures, materials that undergo acoustic-mode instabilities and materials that undergo optical-mode instabilities. A variety of theoretical explanations have been offered recently, including a picture involving microdomains or solitons and an alternative picture involving impurities. As James Krumhansl, a proponent of microdomains told us, “The explanation has not yet been wrapped up and put on the shelf.”
Muonic-atom data dispel lingering doubts on QED
Authors: Scott John T.
Published: April 2009

The last remaining discrepancy between predictions of quantum-electrodynamic theory and experimental observations has now been removed, leaving QED unquestionably the most successful dynamical theory in all of physics. Measurements of x-ray transitions in muonic lead and muonic barium, made at the Space Radiation Effects Lab (College of William and Mary, Newport News, Virginia) and at CERN agree with theoretical predictions based on a muon–nucleus interaction that includes quantum-electrodynamic corrections such as vacuum polarization and Lamb shift. The vacuum-polarization corrections had been causing concern for the last five years because the apparent lack of agreement with experiment represented the only failure in the otherwise phenomenal success of QED.
Thermodynamics and geometry
Authors: Weinhold Frank
Published: April 2009

It is perhaps appropriate that, in a year marking the 100th anniversary of his landmark paper in thermodynamics, new developments should call fresh attention to the special beauty and profundity of the work of J. Willard Gibbs. Recent work has proved the possibility of constructing a new representation of equilibrium thermodynamics, one that is couched in a mathematical language—an intrinsically geometrical structure—quite different from that generally employed.
The nature of elementary particles
Authors: Heisenberg Werner
Published: April 2009

The question, “What is an elementary particle?” must find its answer primarily in experiment, although it must also be confronted with philosphical considerations. I will therefore begin by giving a short survey of the important experimental results of the last fifty years. This survey will show that a critical unbiased study of these results already gives an answer to the question; theory, as we shall see, cannot add much to this answer.
Lunar ranging confirms equivalence principle
Authors: Rothenberg Marian S.
Published: April 2009

Accumulated ranging data from reflector packages placed on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts have verified a previously untestable aspect of the equivalence principle. According to two simultaneously reported but essentially independent analyses of the same laser ranging data, Earth's gravitational self energy contributes equally to its inertial and passive gravitational mass. This equivalence would rule out Brans–Dicke–Jordan theory for small values of the coupling constant. Both analyses were published in the 15 March issue of Physical Review Letters. One, covering six years of data, was reported by the “LURE” group (for Lunar Ranging Experiment): This group was established before the first Apollo mission to carry out the laser ranging experiment. Among its members are James Williams (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Robert Dicke (Princeton University) and Peter Bender (Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics), Carroll Alley (University of Maryland), Douglas Currie and James Faller (JILA), Derral Mulholland and Eric Silverberg (McDonald Observatory, University of Texas). The second report, covering essentially the same data, is by Irwin Shapiro and Charles Counselman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Robert King (Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories).
Searches for intelligence beyond Earth continue
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

The first timid searches for life in space began in 1959 with Project Ozma. Since then quite a number of groups have expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, although the amount of effort is still small in comparison to the difficulty of the problem. At the February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, several groups discussed their pioneering attemps, which, as the reader may suppose, have so far proved unsuccessful.
An overview
Authors: Buchsbaum Solomon J.
Published: April 2009

One hundred years ago Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Shortly thereafter Bell also invented a photophone—a contraption that transmitted human speech on a beam of light. Bell, who had a deep interest in the problems of the deaf, sought ways to make “visible speech.” He had to resort to heroic measures to demonstrate the photophone, using the Sun as the source of light and a Rube-Goldberg-like scheme as a modulator. Although the photophone worked, Bell wisely gave it up in favor of copper wires and electrical transmission.
The fiber lightguide
Authors: Chynoweth Alan G.
Published: April 2009

The realization that the open atmosphere would be a very unreliable medium for the transmission of light led, soon after the invention of the laser, to consideration of the use of conduits, possibly evacuated pipes, for sending the light beams from one place to another, thereby providing a controlled atmosphere. If necessary, such conduits could be fitted with lens and mirror systems to provide beam path correction and beam path redirection. Servomechanisms could be devised to adjust the mirrors and lenses to compensate for such changes as might arise from thermal expansion or other distortions. Such systems could be made to work but undoubtedly they would be very cumbersome and if practical at all, would be so only for very heavy communications traffic routes.
San Diego hosts CLEOS
Authors: Carr Bruce C.
Published: April 2009

San Diego will be the location of the first Conference on Laser and Electro-Optical Systems (CLEOS), to be held 25–27 May in the convention center of the Town and Country Hotel. This California city is a fitting choice for the conference site, as the San Diego–La Jolla area is known for its numerous centers of scientific research and development—the General Atomic Co, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego are just a few.
Positron–electron rings: PETRA and PEP compared
Authors: Bennett Floyd C.
Published: April 2009

When it achieves full operating capacity, the Positron–Electron Tandem Ring Accelerator is expected to produce 19-GeV beams of electrons and 19-GeV beams of positrons. Now under construction at the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron site in Hamburg, PETRA is scheduled to begin operation for colliding-beam experiments in mid-1979. Meanwhile, the Positron–Electron Project, a joint undertaking of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to be built at Stanford, is to have two 18-GeV beams; PEP was included in President Ford's FY 1977 budget request and is expected to start up in early 1980 (see table). The cost estimate for PETRA, which includes buildings but not salaries, is $38 million in 1974 dollars. Total PEP expenditures, expected to reach $78 million, are figured quite differently and include both salaries and an escalation allowance for inflation.
Heard any bad knees lately?
Authors: Scott John T.
Published: April 2009

Knee-joint problems of various kinds seem to affect almost everyone sooner or later, highly priced football players and ordinary mortals alike. A group at the University of Akron have been listening to the clicking and scraping noises of defective knees, and they reported to the 91st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, in Washington last April, on what they had heard. The photograph shows Larry Zavodney, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, with a cow's knee joint that he and Mamerto L. Chu are using for in vitro studies of these sounds.
Is physics human?
Authors: Weisskopf Victor F.
Published: April 2009

There are many people who assert that physics is not “human”; in the view of these people, the methods of physical research and the results obtained from it do not touch on those values, emotions and sentiments we associate with the word “human.” Physics, they claim, has little to do with human relations, with those experiences that are of importance in the world of feelings and emotions, with our being members of a family and a human society or with any contacts of one human being with another.
FIFTY YEARS OF SPIN: It might as well be spin
Authors: Goudsmit Samuel A.
Published: April 2009

It was a little over fifty years ago that George Uhlenbeck and I introduced the concept of spin. The United States, celebrating its bicentennial, is only four times as old as spin—not even an order of magnitude older. It is therefore not surprising that most young physicists do not know that spin had to be introduced. They think that it was revealed in Genesis or perhaps postulated by Sir Isaac Newton, which young physicists consider to be about simultaneous. There are many other fifty-year mileposts in physics, which also have been forgotten, such as the radio-pulse experiments of Merle Tuve and Gregory Breit that later led to radar.
Franklin's physics
Authors: Heilbron John L.
Published: April 2009

Benjamin Franklin usually receives good marks for his physics from those who have taken the trouble to study it. To contemporaries he was the “Kepler of Electricity” (Volta being the Newton), the “Modern Prometheus,” the “Father of Electricity.” Among moderns, Robert Millikan credits him with the discovery of the electron and brackets him with Laplace as the two greatest scientists of the 18th century. Millikan, whose promotion of Franklin was perhaps intended to facilitate a reappraisal of the relative contributions of himself and J. J. Thomson to the investigation of electrons, went too far. But one does not have to consider Franklin a Kepler, Newton, Prometheus or Millikan to perceive that he was one of the most important natural philosophers of the Age of Reason.
Rowland's physics
Authors: Miller John D.
Published: April 2009

“Those were the days,” reminisced Daniel Gilman, the President of The Johns Hopkins University, “when scientific lecture-rooms in America gloried in demonstrations of ‘wonders’ of Nature—‘the bright light, the loud noise, and the bad smell.’ Rowland would have none of this.” The Johns Hopkins physicist thus characterized was Henry Rowland, whose contributions—particularly those in spectroscopy and electromagnetism—secured him a high place in the ranks of nineteenth-century physicists.
Mica giant halos suggest natural superheavy elements
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Evidence for the existence of element 126 and possibly numbers 116, 124 and 127 has been found in several mica samples from Madagascar, implying that these superheavy elements or their parents have been present since the Earth was formed. Most recent theoretical work had predicted an island of stability centered around element 114.
Colliding-beam data offer evidence for charmed particle
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Probably the most convincing evidence for charm yet produced is a new resonance found at SLAC in electron–positron interactions. The particle, of mass 1865±15 MeV, decays into hadrons—either into one kaon and one pion or one kaon and three pions. Many believe that the new particle consists of a bound state of a charmed quark and an uncharmed quark so that it has a net charm. Skeptics of the charm hypothesis would be more convinced if electron–positron annihilists would also observe lepton production, as the charm theory predicts.
Nuclear cross sections for nuclear energy
Authors: Fowler Joseph L. , Havens William W.
Published: April 2009

What is the role of nuclear physics in helping to overcome the present energy problem? With over 200 000 megawatts of capacity already either operational, under construction or on order in the United States, nuclear power unquestionably constitutes one of today's major energy options. In this article we shall consider the research in nuclear physics needed to improve the efficiency and safety of light-water reactors, which make up most of this generating capacity. For the economically promising breeder-reactor programs, both of the fast-neutron and thermal-neutron types, we shall discuss the challenges these present to nuclear physics. The recent International Conference on Nuclear Cross Sections and Technology (see the Bibliography) emphasized the continuing impact of nuclear physics on energy.
German heavy-ion accelerator approaches full energy
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

What will probably be the most completely equipped laboratory in the world for heavy-ion research is now operating 20 km from Frankfurt. The laboratory, GSI (Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung), houses UNILAC, a linear accelerator that is expected to be capable eventually of accelerating heavy nuclei, such as uranium to 10 MeV/nucleon and lighter nuclei, such as argon to 14 MeV/nucleon. When it is operating at full energy, for heavy nuclei, it will have the highest energy available in the world, at least for the immediate future. The accelerator is the first to accelerate heavy ions over the full periodic table.
Quasar puts limit on variation of fundamental constants
Authors: Leuchtag H. Richard
Published: April 2009

Theorists who seek to show that the universal constants of Nature actually vary over cosmic times are now faced with a harder row to hoe. By comparing radio and optical spectra from a quasar, Arthur Wolfe of the University of Pittsburgh, and Robert Brown and Morton Roberts of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Green Bank, West Virginia) have placed narrow limits on the possible variation of three constants. The time span of the observations—granted the widely accepted interpretation of the redshift as reflecting the expansion of the Universe—is over one-third the age of the Universe.
Lunar Polar Orbiter considered for 1980
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Another lunar mission is being studied at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the first US lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. This one, to be launched in 1980, would be unmanned. It would consist of an instrumented polar-orbiting spacecraft (at an altitude of 100 kilometers) and a smaller companion subsatellite (at an altitude of 5000 km), which would serve to track the orbiter for gravity sensing when it is hidden from the Earth by the Moon. The ensemble would be launched by a single Delta launch vehicle. The spacecraft would orbit the moon for one year, examining the Moon's surface with a variety of instruments. These would measure lunar gravity, shape, magnetism and heat flow, and allow the determination of the chemical and mineral composition of the Moon's surface.
Physics of corrosion
Authors: Vermilyea David A.
Published: April 2009

Most metals have a strong affinity for oxygen. Just as a great deal of energy must be supplied to ores to separate the metal from the oxygen, the refined metal has a strong tendency to revert to an oxide form by corrosion.
The diamond cell stimulates high-pressure research
Authors: Block Stanley , Piermarini Gasper
Published: April 2009

Scientific advances can be made either in a dramatic and revolutionary manner or in a slow evolutionary way, sometimes covering a span of several years. An example of the latter process is the diamond-anvil pressure cell, which in about a decade and a half has developed in stepwise fashion from a rather qualitative instrument to the sophisticated quantitative research tool it is today, capable of reaching static pressures in the megabar range.
Laser assists excitation transfer in collisions
Authors: Leuchtag H. Richard
Published: April 2009

In an experiment that introduces a completely new approach to inelastic collisions, the transfer of excitation from one atom to another has been enormously enhanced by resonant optical irradiation. Incident laser light was tuned to a wavelength corresponding to the energy difference between the final and initial states of the colliding atoms. The experiments, in which the 5p strontium atoms transferred their excitation energy to 6s calcium atoms, was performed at Stanford University by Stephen Harris, Roger Falcone, William Green, Derek Lidow, Jonathan White and James Young.
Ion channels in nerve membranes
Authors: Ehrenstein Gerald
Published: April 2009

The molecular mechanisms underlying the message-carrying ability of nerves are not well understood. However, the experimental opportunities offered by the large-diameter “giant” nerve fibers of squid (see cover photo) and certain marine worms (see figure 1) have led to the discovery of significant facts about the origin of the nerve impulse.
The laser instability
Authors: Degiorgio Vittorio
Published: April 2009

Many physical systems exhibit a transition from a disordered state to an ordered one following the change of an externally controlled parameter. Among these cooperative phenomena are the phase transitions of matter, the development of a convection pattern in a fluid layer heated from below—and the onset of lasing in a laser. Ordering phenomena of systems in thermal equilibrium have been known for a long time; their properties near the transition point were studied intensely in the last decade. A wealth of experimental data has shown marked similarities among what appear to be very different phase transitions: A fluid near its critical point behaves very much like a ferromagnet near its Curie point, or to a binary liquid mixture near the consolution point. To see these similarities we must make the appropriate choice for the corresponding variables. A considerable amount of work has been devoted to explaining the simple, universal behavior of thermodynamic systems in the region of the critical point.
Proofreading by biological molecules detects “typos”
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

How does an enzyme know when it is making a mistake? The problem of accuracy in biosynthesis has been studied for a number of years. In DNA synthesis, for example, if too many errors occur a system cannot reproduce viable copies of itself. Too few and the system can never evolve. Solid-state theorist John Hopfield at Princeton has proposed that many biological systems do “kinetic proofreading,” a method of replication in which the system looks twice so that it can correct an initial mistake. Recently several groups have shown experimentally that such proofreading does appear to be taking place.
Magnetic-mirror performance challenges tokamaks
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Results with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory magnetic-mirror experiments over the past year and a bit are encouraging ERDA to push much harder in that direction, so that mirrors might share some of the funds tokamaks have been attracting. The results on 2XIIB are showing how to stabilize the mirror plasma, increase its value of beta and raise nτ, the product of density and confinement time, considerably. Now Livermore has proposed building a new, $94-million Mirror Experiment, MX for short. It is rumored that ERDA has requested the Office of Management and Budget to include MX in the FY 1978 budget.
Electron beams yield high-power microwaves
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Over the past ten years intense relativistic electron-beam accelerators (300 kV–10 MV) have been developed that yield 104–106 amperes/pulse with pulse durations of tens or hundreds of nanoseconds. With this new tool at hand, experimenters have been trying to convert the electron-beam energy into microwaves. By reviving the old devices (travelling-wave tubes and magnetrons) developed a quarter of a century ago and applying the new electron-beam technology, orders of magnitude higher power have been obtained. For example, very recently George Bekefi and Thaddeus Orzechowski (MIT) have produced microwave bursts in the gigawatt range with a conversion efficiency of electron energy into microwave energy of about 35%.
Instrumentation for materials research
Authors: Claassen Richard S.
Published: April 2009

Materials, energy and knowledge together comprise the three basic elements of all industrial activity. Materials as a field of endeavor is not a unified discipline in the traditional sense but is, rather, interdisciplinary, involving several traditional disciplines. The science and technology of materials application have established a community of interest and common purpose for a wide variety of activities, including a significant portion of physics.
Role of crystallography
Authors: Abrahams Sidney C. , Cohen Jerome B.
Published: April 2009

Fundamental advances in materials research depend heavily on crystallographic information. Modern crystallography is concerned with the structural topology of the various states of order in matter; in particular, with the atomic arrangement, collective excitations, and electron and defect distributions in solids. The crystallographic techniques of importance to materials research cover a wide range; an overview was published recently.
Processing materials with lasers
Authors: Breinan Edward M. , Banas Conrad M. , Kear Bernard H.
Published: April 2009

How can we make an alloy to fit a specific materials requirement? The oldest method of alloy fabrication, casting, has two inherent limitations: Phases with high melting points are difficult to melt; and the cooling of the alloys from the melt is slow, so that alloy segregation and phase separation have time to occur. The other traditional method, powder metallurgy, has helped with the second of these problems: Allowing the homogeneous melt to be cooled in tiny droplets makes it possible at least to limit segregation to the scale of the resulting powder particles.
Material analysis with ion beams
Authors: Ziegler James F.
Published: April 2009

All methods of material analysis by target stimulation, whether by photons, electrons or ions, yield a mixture of quantitative and qualitative information. Those techniques that give quantitative information are usually weak on qualitative chemical-binding information, because they are insensitive to the complex perturbations of the outer-shell binding electrons. Energetic ion beams, which interact only with target nuclei, are usually very quantitative and provide no binding information at all. This aspect of ion-beam analysis is its prime asset.
Nobel prize to Richter and Ting for discovery of J/psi
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

The 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Burton Richter of SLAC and Samuel C. C. Ting of MIT “for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind.” Their surprising and far-reaching discovery of the J/ψ particle was announced in November 1974 (PHYSICS TODAY, January 1975, page 17). The prize of $160 000, to be shared equally by Richter and Ting, was scheduled to be awarded on 10 December in Stockholm.
Shortest wavelength laser from harmonic generation
Authors: Leuchtag H. Richard
Published: April 2009

Records for the shortest wavelength at which coherent radiation has been achieved in the search for an x-ray laser system are falling with remarkable speed:

▸ It was only in June that Henry Hutchinson, C. C. Ling and Daniel Bradley (Imperial College, London) reported at the Amsterdam Quantum Electronics Conference that they had extended the range of generation of coherent radiation into the extreme ultraviolet at 570 Å.

▸ After a preliminary paper in August, at the International Conference on the Physics of X-ray Spectra, John Reintjes, Robert Eckardt, Nicholas Karangelen, Raymond Elton and Ronald Andrews of the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC) and Chiao-Yao She of Colorado State University report in a current Letter that they pushed the record down to 532 Å.

▸ Now, at the Tucson meeting of the Optical Society in October, the NRL group reported preliminary results indicating they had reached 380 Å.
New values for boiling and freezing points
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

The values assigned to the temperatures of the boiling point of water and the freezing points of tin and zinc on the International Practical Temperature Scale of 1968 appear to be significantly higher than thermodynamic values. The new measurements, done by Leslie Guildner and Robert Edsinger with a very carefully built gas thermometer at the National Bureau of Standards, may lead to a redefinition of the International Practical Temperature Scale.
Heisenberg and the early days of quantum mechanics
Authors: Bloch Felix
Published: April 2009

It is appropriate in this year, when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of quantum mechanics, and during which we have been saddened by the death of one of its leading founders, Werner Heisenberg, to reminisce about the formative years of the new mechanics. At the time when the foundations of physics were being replaced with totally new concepts I was a student of physics. I sat in the colloquium audience when Peter Debye made the suggestions to Erwin Schrödinger that started him on the study of de Broglie waves and the search for their wave equation. It was from Heisenberg, as his first doctorate student, that I caught the spirit of research, and that I received the encouragement to make my own contributions.
Energy research for physicists
Authors: Reynolds George T.
Published: April 2009

The shortage of energy resources is both an urgent national problem and a challenging research field for physicists. The challenge lies not only in the technical problems to be solved but also in the need to interrelate the technical solutions with economic, political and environmental factors. The physicist may have to adapt in several ways to this new interdisciplinary atmosphere. However, many have already made the transition successfully, either in short-term advisory roles or as permanent members of energy-studies teams. The extensive shopping list of energy problems to which a physicist can contribute include conservation, coal technology, fission and fusion. Suffice it here to discuss interesting aspects of wind, solar and geothermal energy as only three examples and to illustrate ways in which just one branch of physics—fluid dynamics—can contribute.
Phimsy
Authors: Ellis R. Hobart
Published: April 2009

Let me tell you about Ellis; Have quarks been seen?; The physics of wine…; …and the wine of physics.
Science and the war on…
Authors: Crewe Albert V.
Published: April 2009

I N THE LAST FEW YEARS I have had more than usual opportunity to reflect on the aims, ambitions and purposes of science. Lack of real opportunity to engage in active scientific research and forced concentration on science administration has meant that I have been more concerned with policy decisions than the details of any particular project. This has been a valuable interlude because the horizons of science are necessarily broader than any single project could ever be.
The Los Alamos years
Authors: Weisskopf Victor F.
Published: April 2009

THE YEAR 1939 changed many things. It witnessed the beginning of the most destructive war in history. It has also changed science. Many physicists who never were interested in applications of science devoted their skills to the necessities of war and became applied physicists. They faced new problems, new experiences, different from the accustomed academic environment. But the deepest change in the character of our science came from the discovery of fission. Many of us hoped at that time—and Oppenheimer was one of them—that the number of neutrons released would have been small enough to prevent a chain reaction. But soon enough it was clear that, on the forefront of the most esoteric and basic part of our science, a phenomenon was discovered, full of tremendous destructive and constructive potentialities. It was not yet ready for exploitation; many staggering problems had to be solved, but the way was clearly indicated. Many physicists were drawn into this work, by fate and destiny rather than enthusiasm. A threat hung over us, the frightening possibility of finding this new and incredibly powerful weapon in the hands of the powers of evil, but there is no doubt that we were also attracted by the unique challenge of dealing with nuclear phenomena on a large scale, with taming an essentially cosmic process.
The Princeton period
Authors: Pais Abraham
Published: April 2009

IN SEPTEMBER 1946 the American Physical Society met in midtown Manhattan. In the minutes of this meeting we read that it “was confined to papers on three topics: cosmic-ray phenomena, theories of elementary particles and the design and operation of accelerators of nuclear particles and electrons. Disparate as these three subjects may appear to be, the trend of physics is rapidly uniting them.”
Comments on Indian institutes
Authors: Sen S. N. , Blanpied William A. , Bilaniuk Olexa-Myron , Sharma Ravi Dutta , Rao K. V. , Hafner Everett M.
Published: April 2009

In his recent article “An Institute in North Bengal” (PHYSICS TODAY, June, page 44) Everett M. Hafner has recorded his views regarding the Summer Institute for College Teachers (Physics) held at our university in June–July 1966 under the auspices of the University Grants Commission and the United States Agency for International Development. At the very outset, he has characterized the outcome of the institute as a failure, on which point I totally disagree. I maintain that the institute achieved the same degree of success as other similar institutes held simultaneously in other universities in India.
Search for Magnetic Monopole in Deep-Sea Sediment
Authors: Kolm Henry H.
Published: April 2009

Magnetic fields in the 150-kG range are being used at the MIT National Magnet Laboratory in an attempt to extract magnetic monopoles from ferromagnetic materials, where they may have been accumulating for geological periods of time. Although results are inconclusive so far, they are compatible with a charge one third the value predicted by P.A.M. Dirac in 1931.
1-GeV Protons Probe Motion of Nucleons in Nuclear Matter
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

The exceptional stability and high energy of the Cosmotron beam and recent improvements in wire spark-chamber techniques have been used to probe the distribution of matter in light nuclei. In a race to beat the final shutdown of the Cosmotron an 11-man team (Harry Palevsky, Joseph Friedes, Richard Sutter and Gerald Bennett of Brookhaven, George J. Igo of Los Alamos, Dwayne Simpson and Gerald Phillips of Rice University, Daniel Corley and Nathan S. Wall of the University of Maryland, Robert Stearns of Vassar College and Bernard Gottschalk of Northeastern University) used 1-GeV protons to probe the nucleus in much the same way as x rays probe condensed matter. Their first results were reported in Phys. Rev. Letters 18, 1200 and 19, 387.
Arbitrariness in physics
Authors: Lindsay R. Bruce
Published: April 2009

WHAT IS SCIENCE? Briefly it is a way of talking about human experience with gestures. Talking makes all that happens in our daily lives intelligible to ourselves and others; gestures are overt activities by which we attempt to manipulate our experience into more tractable form. They are the operators by which we carry out our experiments. Science is a game in which we pretend that things are not wholly what they seem in order that we may make sense out of them in terms of mental processes peculiar to us as human beings. To approach an assessment of science less flippantly and with more modesty about its relation to other ways of coping with experience, we may say that science is a method for the description, creation and understanding of human experience, in which “experience” means the sum total of everything that happens to us in life plus our reflections on these things with our minds.
Muonium
Authors: Hughes Vernon W.
Published: April 2009

MUONIUM IS THE atom consisting of a positive muon and an electron. In this article I review the work that has been done on muonium and has been reported in the Literature. The work started about 10 years ago when parity nonconservation was discovered.
The visionary ideas of Bernhard Riemann
Authors: Jaggi Martin P.
Published: April 2009

GEORG FRIEDRICH BERNHARD RIEMANN ranks among the most important mathematicians and theoretical physicists of the 19th century. Although he died at the age of 39, he managed to devote 17 years of his life to the visionary concepts of his work. His areas of interest were varied, and today we know that Riemann anticipated a large part of the research in mathematics and physics of our century. We can safely assume that the history of these two subjects would have taken a different course had he been granted the life span of Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler or Karl Friedrich Gauss.
Plasma confinement in the toroidal multipole
Authors: Ohkawa Tihiro , Rostoker Norman
Published: April 2009

PLASMA CONFINEMENT SYSTEMS of various kinds have been studied in many countries for more than 15 years, with the attainment of controlled thermonuclear fusion as the aim. Most of the effort, particularly recently, has been devoted to stellarators; the largest machines are the C Stellarator at the plasma physics laboratory of Princeton University and the Tokomak at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. More recently experiments with toroidal multipole devices have shown that the containment time may be at least ten times that for stellarators, by reducing the loss of plasma density through “pumpout” or Bohm diffusion, a turbulence effect that had been the limiting factor of earlier machines.
Superconducting Alpha-Uranium Shows Positive Isotope Effect
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

The superconducting transition temperature Tc of alpha-uranium is higher for U238 than for U235 according to a recent experiment at Los Alamos by Robert D. Fowler, James D. G. Lindsay, Ralph W. White (Los Alamos), H. Hunter Hill (Los Alamos and University of California, La Jolla) and Bernd T. Matthias (Bell Labs and University of California, La Jolla). It was reported in Phys. Rev. Letters, 16 Oct.
Bohr Institute Still Studies The Quantum and the Nucleus
Authors: Ellis R. Hobart
Published: April 2009

The Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen is bigger today than it used to be when it was the Institute for Theoretical Physics. The name changed in 1965, when the founder's name was added, but the program remains about the same as it was in earlier days. The word “theoretical” was meant to mean “basic” as opposed to “applied,” and its disappearance implies no change.
High Isobaric Spin States Are Found in Light Nuclei
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Nuclear physicists are enthusiastically exploiting their new ability to observe states whose isobaric spins are higher by one or two units than the ground state in light nuclei. During the past few years experimenters have located the lower T = 3/2 (where low-lying states are 1/2) and T = 2 (where low lying states are 0) states in most of the light nuclei. Since excited states are spread widely in energy in the light nuclei, high T states occur at high energy, and to produce them one needs an electrostatic accelerator (4–20 MeV) or an intermediate-energy cyclotron (about 50 MeV) with good energy resolution.
Russians See Element 102, Call it Joliot-curium
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but would an element? Number 102, officially known as nobelium and occasionally called rutherfordium, has been renamed joliot-curium by a Russian group that suggests that it may be the first actually to observe the element. At the International Conference on Heavy-Ion Physics held at Dubna last October, G. N. Flerov, director of the Dubna Laboratory for Nuclear Reactions, reported that his group had produced five different isotopes of element 102. The new observations disagree with Berkeley measurements in 1958, 1959 and 1961, in which two isotopes of element 102 were reported, and experiments at the Nobel Institute in 1957, which indicated one or two isotopes of 102 had been found.
Color science and color photography
Authors: MacAdam David L.
Published: April 2009

COLOR SCIENCE IS based on important contributions of many well known figures: Isaac Newton, Thomas Young, Hermann Helmholtz, Hermann Grassman, James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrödinger to mention only the most prominent. Seemingly as an aside, incidental to one of his lucid lectures, Maxwell invented three-color photography. He explained the principle on which all modern color photography, color printing and color television are based. Despite years of development, however, those who practice those arts still have much to learn from Maxwell and Frederic Ives, who first practiced, interpreted and championed Maxwell's idea, and from the science of color that grew out of the work of Maxwell, Ives and Ives's son Herbert.
Physics in Central America
Authors: Wray John H.
Published: April 2009

THE IMPACT of world scientific progress has been keenly felt throughout Central America. (For our purposes Central America includes Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.) The people of Central America are not only cognizant of this progress, but are very interested in its effect upon their culture, national and international politics, economy and future. One needs only to assess the space devoted to reporting of significant scientific achievements by the various news media of the region, or to converse with its people, to conclude that interest in science is definitely rising.
Gravitational theory and observation
Authors: Dicke Robert H.
Published: April 2009

ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the publication of Albert Einstein's general relativity, his theory of gravitation, it is appropriate to reconsider the observational support of this theory and its place in contemporary physics. Within the framework of most of today's specialized physical disciplines, gravitation appears superficially to be of little significance. Nonetheless, some of the most enigmatic and puzzling of physical problems intimately involve this phenomenon.
Foundíng a famíly of fíddles
Authors: Hutchins Carleen Maley
Published: April 2009

FOR THREE OR FOUR centuries string quartets as well as orchestras both large and small, have used violins, violas, cellos and contrabasses of classical design. These wooden instruments were brought to near perfection by violin makers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Only recently, though, has testing equipment been good enough to find out just how they work, and only recently have scientific methods of manufacture been good enough to produce consistently instruments with the qualities one wants to design into them. Now, for the first time, we have eight instruments of the violin family constructed on principles of proper resonance for desired tone quality. They represent the first successful application of a consistent acoustical theory to a whole family of musical instruments.
New foundations for quantum physics
Authors: Landé Alfred
Published: April 2009

SIXTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO Max Planck initiated the quantum age, but its conceptual content still mystifies the student. And the efforts to explain the basic mathematical rules of the theory by developing them from certain fundamental principles (wave-particle duality and complementarity) beg the question since those rules and principles themselves are of a quantum character. For this reason several theorists have gone one step further in their analysis and have established a system of axioms that do not include any quantum rule explicitly. However the axioms—I refer to the 14 theses of Fritz Bopp in the Heisenberg festschrift and those of Günther Ludwig in his Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik—are of a highly abstract mathematical kind and will hardly satisfy the physicist's desire for an explanation of the bewildering quantum theory.
Pair-Production Experiment Finds QED Still Good Theory
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: April 2009

Despite two separate experiments in the past two years on electron-positron pair production that indicate a violation of quantum electrodynamics for small distances (about 3×10−14 cm), a recent experiment at the DESY 6.2-GeV electron synchrotron does not confirm the earlier results. A collaboration between groups from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Hamburg (J. G. Asbury, W. K. Bertram, U. Becker, P. Joos, M. Rhodes and A. J. S. Smith) and Columbia University (S. Friedlander, C. Jordan and Samuel C. C. Ting) reports (Phys. Rev. Letters, 9 Jan. 1967) that first-order quantum electrodynamics correctly predicts pair production for momentum transfers as great as 400 MeV/c.
Pre-college: Engineering concepts
Authors: David Edward E. , Truxal John G.
Published: April 2009

IN THE FALL of 1963, the National Science Foundation held a meeting in Washington, D.C. to explore the question: “Are there desirable approaches to the study of physics and physical science in high schools other than those presently available?” Discussion was spirited, but most of the conferees left convinced that a “pluralistic” approach to high-school physics could go far in bolstering lagging student enrollments in physics. It seemed reasonable that the enormous range of student interests, inclinations and aptitudes could be well served by several alternative approaches. Some of us who attended that exploratory conference shared a strong interest in engineering. We thought that the engineering viewpoint offered an opportunity for a radically different approach.
College: The new MIT course
Authors: Hulsizer Robert I.
Published: April 2009

DESCRIBING THE NEW introductory course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is like trying to describe an evolving nation. It exists and therefore can be characterized at its present state. Yet one's view of the course is a mixture of past tradition, past and present hopes and partial realization of these hopes. Furthermore, any introductory course perforce selects its topics, viewpoints and themes from a set far too rich to be encompassed in any one course. The course described therefore represents a compromise of many choices and many points of view. It also represents the present state of experimentation, from which any particular lecturer will depart and from which the future structure will certainly depart.
College: Physical science for nonscientists
Authors:   PSNS staff
Published: April 2009

DURING 1963 AND 1964 the Commission on College Physics and the Advisory Council for College Chemistry sponsored a series of conferences to encourage the birth of a project to design a new two-semester course in physical science for nonscience majors, chiefly for prospective elementary-school teachers. As an outgrowth of these conferences the PSNS Project was born in April 1965 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, under a grant from the National Science Foundation.
College: Commission on college physics
Authors: Fowler John M.
Published: April 2009

SUCCESSFUL RESEARCH leads to discovery; successful teaching shares these discoveries with others. The academic physicist bears a responsibility to both teaching and research. Although the quantities displayed in figure 1 do not precisely measure performance in either area, few will quarrel with the trend their contrast dramatizes: In the last 30 years physics has made spectacular additions to the knowledge of the universe, but a diminishing fraction of the educated population is sharing this knowledge.