bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Nemesis in Nancy
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

R. W. Wood (1868-1955), Professor of Physics at Johns Hopkins University, was a leader in his field of spectroscopy, and also a noted wit and farceur. His escapades became legendary. He would alarm the dtizens of Baltimore by spitting into puddles on wet days, while surreptitiously dropping in a lump of metallic sodium, which would explode in a jet of yellow flame. He wrote clever verses, a collection of which was published as a slim volume with the title, How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers, and is still intermittently in print.

It was related that when, as a young man, Wood was staying in a rooming house in Paris, he astonished his fellow guests by sprinkling copious amounts of a white powder over the bones left on the plates after a dinner of chicken. The next night, when the soup was served, Wood brought out a small spirit burner and dropped a little of the liquid on the flame. A red flash drew a smile of satis faction: the white powder, he explained to the other diners, was lithium chloride and the red flash indicated that it was now in the soup. His suspicion that the landlady recycled the bones was thus confirmed. It must be said, however, that what was in essence the same story has also been imputed to Georg von Hevesy [112], the pioneer of radioactive tracers: he was supposed to have laced the left overs with a radioactive salt and detected the radioactivity in the soup with a Geiger counter. This is a much more sensitive test than the lithium flame, which would probably have required an unacceptable amount of the salty-tasting lithium chloride; but everyone to his own speciality. (Victor Moritz Gold schmidt, a distinguished geochemist, was reputed to have carried a capsule of potassium cyanide when he was planning his escape from Nazi Germany. When a friend in the engineering department of the university expressed interest, Goldschmidt was supposed to have replied that cyanide was for professors of chemistry; his friend, a professor of mechanics, would have to carry a rope.)
Slot machine yields jackpot
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

A remarkable example of how inspiration can come unbidden from an extraneous source is related by the geneticist Salvador Luria (1912-91). An Italian, driven out of his country by Mussolini’s antisemitic laws, he found refuge at the University of Indiana, where he launched himself into the study of bacteriophage genetics. This proved an immensely fruitful move and Luria, together with a small group of other pioneers, including Jim Watson [88], his student, and the spiritual leader of the movement, Max Delbriick in California, laid the foundations of molecular genetics, as it has evolved today.

Luria had been studying the fate of bacteria infected by a bacteriophage (a virus that attacks a bacterium and multiplies within, until its numerous progeny burst open the cell and spill out, ready to attack more bacteria); he had noticed that a few colonies of bacteria in his dishes of nutrient agar gel survived the onslaught. They were clearly mutants and the question now was whether these bacteria had been transformed by the action of the bacteriophage or whether they arose by occasional spontaneous mutations that rendered them resistant to attack.
Shooting down Venus
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The following passage occurs in a letter from J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, to Eleanor Roosevelt:

Very shortly before the test of the first atomic bomb, people at Los Alamos were naturally in a state of some tension. I remember one morning when almost the whole project was out of doors staring at a bright object in the sky through glasses, binoculars and whatever else they could find; and nearby Kirtland Field reported to us that they had no interceptors which had enabled them to come within range of the object. Our director of personnel was an astronomer and a man of some human wisdom; and he finally came to my office and asked whether we would stop trying to shoot down Venus. I tell this story only to indicate that even a group of scientists is not proof against the errors of suggestion and hysteria.

Oppenheimer (1904-67)was a remarkable theoretical physicist, possessor of a scientific intellect of formidable scope. Most of the stories that gathered around him made him out to be an intimidating personage. He evidently also had an engaging side. Here is a vignette from Martin Kamen, who, as a young post doctoral scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, became friendly with him.
None so blind
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

F. A. Lindemann, born in Germany into a family of Alsatian origins but brought up in England, was a protege of Walther Nernst [14], the great German physical chemist. In 1919, aged 33, he was appointed to the Chair of Experimental Philosophy (otherwise known as physics) in Oxford. He had acquired much credit for his work on military aircraft during the First World War; most spectacularly he conceived a theory for how to recover control during a tailspin— a lethal hazard for the early aviators. To test his reasoning he taught himself to fly and deliberately threw his plane into a tailspin. Perhaps unfortunately for Oxford, he survived. Lindemann had an austere, saturnine personality. Independently rich, he was more at home in the country seats of the aristocracy and the committee rooms of Whitehall than in the laboratory. He was a bachelor and lived in a suite of rooms in his college, Christ Church.

His colleague and biographer, the economist Roy Harrod, remembered calling on Lindemann one morning to find him in a characteristic pose: he was sitting in a tall chair, tying his bow-tie, with one valet kneeling before him polishing his shoes while another took dictation.
The child is father to the man
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Jeremy Bernstein, in his essay ‘A child’s garden of science’, has collected the childhood reminiscences of a number of theoretical physicists, which reveal how their curiosity about numbers was first ignited.

The great theoretician Hans Bethe (busy into his nineties with theoretical physics, which he insists is the most interesting of all human occupations), when asked whether he had any early memories of mathematics, replied:

Oh, yes—many. I was interested in numbers from a very early age. When I was five, I said to my mother on a walk one day, ‘Isn’t it strange that if a zero comes at the end of a number it means a lot but if it is at the beginning it doesn’t mean anything?’ And one day when I was about four, Richard Ewald, a professor of physiology, who was my father’s boss, asked me on the street, ‘What is .5 divided by 2?’ I answered, ‘Dear Uncle Ewald, that I don’t know’, but the next time I saw him I ran to him and said, ‘Uncle Ewald, it’s .25’. I knew about decimals then. When I was seven I learned about powers, and filled a whole book with the powers of two and three.
A sceptic confounded
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Logan Pearsall Smith was a man of letters, not a scientist, but he became a brother-in-law of Bertrand Russell. During his undergraduate years in Oxford he was befriended by Benjamin Jowett, the formidable Master of Balliol College and Professor of Greek. Jowett had strong views about the purpose of a university and was the prime advocate of the tutorial system. He saw research as a threat to the prevailing order and could discern no virtues in it—as this exchange with Logan Pearsall Smith reveals. The knee-jerk reflex was discovered by two German neurobiologists; reflexes, defined as impulses transmitted to the central nervous system and ‘reflected’ back to a muscle so as to induce an involuntary movement, were at the time a major preoccupation of physiologists.
Whispers from the void
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Late in life Andrei Sakharov, the venerated physicist, begetter of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, and indefatigable dissident, told an interviewer: ‘Do you know what I love most in life? It is the radio background emanation-the barely discernible reflection of unknown cosmic processes that ended billions of years ago.’ This radiation was discovered, or at least publicized, in 1965, but its existence had been predicted some 20 years before. It was another Russian, the emigre physicist George Gamow ( 1904-68 ), who formulated the theory of what became known as the big bang-the moment when the Universe created itself out of nothing. Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California had discerned the famous red shift in the light from remote stars, which told him that the Universe is expanding. Working back from the rate of this expansion, Gamow calculated what would have happened at time zero, when the mass of the matter that now makes up the Cniverse erupted from its point of origin. The creation of all this matter would have been accompanied by the release of an enveloping torrent of radiation. As the Universe inflated so this spread out wards, diminishing in energy as it thinned.
The lying stones of Mount Eivelstadt
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

This cause celebre occurred in the eighteenth century and brought ridicule on a German scholar at the University of Wurzburg. Dr Johann Beringer was not only a member of the faculty there, but was an intimate of the Prince-Bishop, whom he attended as personal physician. Beringer was also a keen palaeontologist and collected fossils. In 1725, some young men of the locality presented him with a collection of finds from a site near the town on Mount Eivelstadt. The specimens were fakes, stones incised with images of a wide variety of modern animals and plants. As the collection grew’ Beringer’s excitement mounted and by 1726 he had published a book, describing his discoveries. They were not confined to plants and animals:

Here were clear depictions of the sun and moon, of stars and of comets with their fiery tails. And lastly, as the supreme prodigy commanding the reverend admiration of myself and of my fellow examiners, were magnificent tablets engraved in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew characters with the ineffable name of Jehovah.
Strong medicine
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The chemists of the German pharmaceutical company C. H. Boehringer und Sohn were after a vasoconstrictor (an agent that causes swollen blood vessels to contract) to mitigate the symptoms of the common cold. If such a compound could be found that would pass through the mucous surfaces, it might, when dropped into the nose, shrink the small vessels and unblock the nasal passage. Helmut Stahle had synthesized a series of related compounds (familiar to organic chemists as imidazoline derivatives), which he hoped might serve the purpose. One day in 1962 samples were delivered to the medical director of the company, Dr Wolf. By a happy chance Dr Wolf s secretary, Frau Schwandt, was in the grip of a heavy cold, and feeling that little harm could come from trying a smidgeon of the new substance, which was of a kind judged generally harmless, he instilled a little of a dilute solution into her nose. Frau Schwandt apparently yawned and fell into a deep slumber from which she could not be roused until the next day. There was naturally much alarm; a doctor was summoned and discovered that the human guinea-pig’s blood pressure had dropped precipitately. Frau Schwandt happily suffered no lasting harm and the chemical eventually reached the market under the name of Clonidine. It acted, it turned out, on the peripheral nervous system, and found widespread use as a treatment for hypertension and a range of other disorders.
The trivial and profound
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Richard Feynman insisted that physics to him was play-that he took up a problem for no better reason than that it presented an intellectual challenge or tickled his curiosity. His first academic appointment was at Cornell University, where he arrived in 1945, a youthful professor, often mistaken for a student. Here he shows how unpredictable the outcome of research can be.

Within a week [of his arrival at Cornell] I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the revolving plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ‘Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why its two to one?’
Liberation by fire
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Miriam Rothschild, the self-taught and distinguished zoologist, who has written captivatingly about her passions—notably in the book, Flukes, Fleas and Cuckoos (1952)—has told how she was liberated from the tyranny of her early studies on trematodes, which are microscopic parasitic worms. It was the beginning of the Second World War and Miriam Rothschild was on the staff of the Marine Biological Station in Plymouth. As a volunteer air-raid warden, she had suggested that fire-fighting equipment be installed in the laboratory. The director had demurred: there would be no bombing of cities in this war, he opined, and, even if there were, Plymouth would be spared, for everyone knew that the oil storage tanks were empty, the docks of negligible importance, and the city was anyway remote from the flight path of German bombers. The air raid duly ensued, the storage tanks, which were not empty at all, were set ablaze, and the laboratory, too, was hit.
Seeing sparks
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Tn German a radio transmitter is a sender of sparks, for the discovery of radio waves was indeed associated with the appearance of sparks. In 1886, Heinrich Hertz, whose name is enshrined in the unit of frequency (the number of cycles per second of an electromagnetic oscillation), was a young professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, a backwater of learning, where he had to deliver lectures on such matters as meteorology for farmers. He tried his best, with minimal resources and little optimism, to get a programme of research going. His interest was in electromagnetic radiation and especially in the exploration of Maxwell’s theory [44], In the summer of that year Hertz married and on the day of his great discovery, 1 November 1886, his wife, who took an interest in his work, was at his side.
A visit to the Führer
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Max Planck was a tragic figure. When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany Planck was the most respected and influential scientist in the country. It was he who had sparked the revolution in physics with the discovery that radiant energy is quantized; exists, that is to say, in the form of defined packets, or quanta. Planck, an ascetic figure, the last of a line of Lutheran pastors, became a friend of Albert Einstein, with whom he played chamber music. His eldest son fell in battle in the First World war, his beloved twin daughters both died in childbirth, and his younger son was executed in the last weeks of the Second World War, accused of participation in the plot on Hitler’s life the year before. When Hitler became Chancellor and promulgated the racial (Nuremberg) laws, Planck was President of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (now the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft)—the organization set up, with the blessing of the Kaiser, to promote scientific progress through its chain of research institutes, encompassing all branches of science. Dismayed at the dismissal of the Jews, among whom were many of his friends, Planck found himself in a painful dilemma. A public protest might have resulted in his own ejection from his position of power within the academic establishment, and he therefore saw it as his duty—misguidedly, as some of his more upright colleagues, and especially the expelled Jews, felt—to keep quiet, cleave to his presidency, and try to protect what could be salvaged of German physics. Einstein for one could not forgive him and never communicated with him again. But in May of 1933, when the Jewish exodus was beginning, Planck sought an audience with Hitler and supposedly tried to remonstrate. Here is Planck’s account of the interview, set down 14 years after the event:
Butterfly in Beijing
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The phenomenon of chaos—the emergence of patterns out of randomness— has in recent years touched almost every area of science. Irregularities in physical and biological (indeed, even in economic) processes were always regarded as defying theoretical analysis and were accordingly shunned by theoreticians. Turbulence in fluid flow was one practical problem, which had troubled both engineers and physiologists, and physicists had long been irked by the seemingly random transitions between steady and sporadic flow of water from a dribbling tap. The ideas behind chaos theory had been hazily prefigured in earlier years, but the beginnings of the subject can properly be dated to 1961, and the place, MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edward Lorenz was a meteorologist, trained as a mathematician; his interest was long-range weather forecasting, and he had recognized early on that any system of equations aimed at simulating the change with time of a weather pattern would become tractable only with the advent of the high-speed computer. Lorenz had acquired one of the first commercially available machines and he had written a crude program for the change in a weather pattern, based on 12 equations. His computer disgorged an endless series of successive weather maps.
Grand Gnignol
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The spontaneous-generation controversy dates back to the very birth of biological science. It smouldered for centuries and occasionally flared up in impassioned disputes. By about the seventeenth century it had acquired a religious dimension, for the notion that life could arise spontaneously from inert matter was contrary to Christian teaching, which held that God had personally assembled a specimen of each species that it might procreate and duly die. The argument was settled for practical purposes by Louis Pasteur in the late nineteenth century, although dissenting voices were not finally silenced until another 50 years had passed.

Early in the nineteenth century the debate focused in large measure on parasites, such as tapeworms, which, common sense dictated, could originate only in the putrefying matter inside the intestine. Then, in the fourth and fifth decades of the century, the transfer of parasites or their eggs between hosts of different species was demonstrated. In 1854, Friedrich Kiichenmeister (1820—90), a doctor in Dresden, who had developed a particular interest in parasites, motivated in large part by a religious ardour to understand God’s purpose, uncovered the life cycle of the tapeworm. His method was peculiarly gruesome.
Out of the mouths of poets
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

One of the more alarming medical therapies, loosely based on physiological theorizing, was introduced by a formidable Viennese psychiatrist, Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857—1940). He did not hold with the Freudian philosophy, which in Vienna admitted of little dissent, and was an early enthusiast for pharmacological intervention. He had, he thought, seen an improvement in the condition of some of his disturbed patients after they recovered from feverish infections. This led him to a hypothesis (which later proved wrong) of how an increased body temperature might redound on the brain. He decided to try his theory on his patients, whom he proceeded to infect with streptococci, staphylococci, and then with tuberculosis. The results of these terrifying experiments boosted his confidence in the approach, and he now went one step further: he injected blood from a victim of fulminating malaria into a syphilitic patient in an advanced state of paresis. There was, Wagner-Jauregg delightedly reported, a notable improvement in the patient’s mental state.
A principle misapplied
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

R. V. Jones, the physicist, has related the following cautionary tale. Outside the Clarendon Laborator)’ in Oxford he came across a dirty beaker full of water just when 1 happened to have a pistol in my hand [Jones does not enlarge on this—perhaps unusual—circumstance). Almost without thinking 1 tired, and was surprised at the spectacular way in which the beaker disappeared. I had, of course [sic!], fired at beakers before; but they had merely broken, and not shattered into small fragments. Following Rutherford’s precept [presumably to test conscientiously the reproducibility of experimental observations] 1 repeated the experiment and obtained the same result: it was the presence of the water which caused the difference in behaviour. Years later, after the War, 1 found myself having to lecture to a large elementary class at Aberdeen, teaching hydrostatics an initio. Right at the beginning came the definitions—a gas having little resistance to change of volume but a liquid having great resistance. 1 thought that 1 would drive the definitions home by repeating for the class my experiments with the pistol, for one can look at them from the point of view of the beaker, thus suddenly challenged to accommodate not only the liquid that it held before the bullet entered it, but also the bullet, it cannot accommodate the extra volume with the speed demanded, and so it shatters.
The emperor’s chessboard
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

According to legend, a Chinese Emperor asked a sage what reward he would require in return for an important service. The sage named his price: nothing more than some rice, two grains to be placed on the first square of a chessboard, four on the second, eight on the third, and so on. A modest demand, the Emperor thought, and happily agreed; but he had failed to grasp the principle of logarithmic progressions. The entire rice crop of the empire would have had to go on a single square, long before the sixty-fourth was reached.

It was the same simple calculation, so obvious to anyone conversant with numbers, that led to what has been arguably the most important technological innovation of our time. It won Kary Mullis, the maverick American biologist, the Nobel Prize in 1993. Here is how he recalls the blinding moment of revelation, an experience cranted to only a few scientists in a workinc lifetime.
Hevesy’s subterfuge
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

When, soon after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, the racial laws were promulgated, James Franck (1882-1964), physicist and Nobel Laureate, resolved to leave Germany immediately, even though, as a Fromkanipfer in the First World War, he was still at that stage exempt. Fearing that his gold Nobel Prize medal would be confiscated, he entrusted it to a friend, Niels Bohr [79], in Copenhagen. Max von Laue (1879-1960), the most upright and courageous of the German scientists who remained in Berlin and taught the forbidden science of relativity throughout the Nazi period (he told Einstein that he always assured students that the original papers had been written in Hebrew), had the same concern. Bohr debated about what he should do with the three gold medals— Franck’s, Laue’s, and his own—and conferred with a colleague, Georg von Hevesy (a Hungarian physicist, who pioneered the use of radioactive isotopes [149] in biology and medicine). A desperate situation, they decided, demanded desperate measures. Here, in Hevesy’s words, is what they resolved:
Little brown dog
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

During Queen Victoria’s reign a powerful anti-vivisection movement sprang up in Britain, strongly represented in both Houses of Parliament. Physiologists, such as Claude Bernard and Charles Richet [ 1501 in France, and Michael Foster and Burdon Sanderson in Britain, attracted the hatred of animal-lovers. It was undoubtedly true that many callous, and often unnecessary experiments were conducted on living animals, especially in France, where no legal restraints existed. Claude Bernard [138], the greatest physiologist of all, was a target of violent abuse (even from his own family), and his teacher, Francois Magendie, even more so. Anti-vivisectionists from England infiltrated Magendie’s lecture demonstrations and reported on the cruel and repellent scenes that they had witnessed. A Member of Parliament, Henry Labouchere, recalled the cacophony of screams from the experimental animals that assailed his ears in the corridors of the Medical School in Paris, and the reaction of the doorman when he remarked on it: ‘Que voulez-vous? C’est la science.’ Magendie would often be heard to address the struggling dog, strapped down on the table before him: ‘Tais-toi, pauvre betel’
Their Lordships kick a football
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The discovery of buckminsterfullerene in 1985 was for chemists the event of the decade, perhaps of the previous several decades. Carbon is the most intensively studied of the elements, for its compounds are what constitute organic chemistry and, indeed, the chemistry of life. It distinguishes itself from other elements in its capacity to form long and complex chains in an endless variety of configurations. The carbon atom is quadrivalent, forms bonds—that is to say, to four other atoms, which may or may not be carbon. These bonds are symmetrically disposed pointing from the carbon atom towards the corners of a regular tetrahedron, a pyramid with triangular faces and four apices. Carbon in its elementary state will form a crystal made up of atoms linked together in this manner, and that crystal is diamond. There is another form of elementary carbon, in which three bonds point towards the corners of an equilateral triangle, with another, weaker bond pointing out of the plane of the triangle. In this form the carbon atoms give rise to a planar structure of fused hexagons like a honeycomb, and multiple layers of this kind stack up on one another. That form of carbon is graphite, and the sliding of the layers over one another accounts for its properties as a lubricant. All this has been known for well over a century. Imagine then the astonishment, and in some circles derisive disbelief, when the discovery of a completely new form of elementary carbon hit the headlines in 1985.
The power of incantations
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Bruce Frederick Cummings was an English amateur marine biologist, who desperately hankered after an academic career and was thwarted by poverty and ill-health; he died of tuberculosis in 1919 aged 30. Under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion, he wrote a classic memoir, with the title The Journal of a Disappointed Man. It is full of acute observation, couched in limpid prose, but the tone is sour with resentment at the airs of the overweening academic establishment of the day.

Here is an example. The scene is a meeting of the Entomological Society and Professor Edward Poulton is one of the emerging breed of biologists, in thrall to the new genetics. Cummings is sharply aware of the gulf that divides Poulton and his like from the scientifically backward beetle-hunters. ‘There were’, he writes, ‘a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another poor little pinned insects in collecting boxes’, but

It was really a one-man show, Professor Poulton, a man of very considerable attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our country’s butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got up and barked, ‘Mendelian characters’, or ‘Germ plasm’, what time the obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose, having frequently heard these and similar phrases fall from the lips of the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any question. So every time the Professor says, ‘Allelomorph’, or some such phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell it is all about.
The mosquito bites back
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

DDT, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which surfaced during the Second World War , heralded, so it appeared, man’s final victory over malaria, typhoid, and other insect-borne diseases. A few years earlier its seemingly miraculous efficacy had been perceived by a chemist at the Swiss pharmaceutical concern, the J. R. Geigy company. His name was Paul Muller, and for his discovery he was eventually rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Muller, then 26, joined Geigy in 1925 and had worked on a variety of problems before settling on a search for the perfect insecticide. Geigy were especially interested in the prospect of an agent that would be more effective than mothballs (naphthalene) in discouraging the domestic clothes moth. Muller had been testing a range of synthetic chemicals by placing some of the substance into a glass tank, which he then filled with the insects. His fascination with this project earned him some mockery from his colleagues and the nickname Fliegenmüller (or fly-Müller).
Some are born great
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Richard Feynman [89] was a young physicist, whose prodigious abilities had already been recognized, when he was summoned to a meeting at Princeton University, where he was still completing his doctoral thesis. It marked the beginning of the Manhattan Project to construct an atom bomb. Here is how, some 40 years later, he remembered one of the early discussions.

One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium [to extract the very small proportion of the fissionable isotope [ 149] |. The committee had men like [A. H.] Compton and [R. C.] Tolman and [H. D.| Smyth and [H. C.] Urey and [I. I.] Rabi and [J. R.J Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they’d ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it.
A mathematical death
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Abraham de Moivre was a French-born mathematician, famous for his work on probability theory—he was the first to grasp the principles of random distributions—on complex numbers (the device, inseparable from many areas of mathematics and physics, of representing a property in terms of a ‘real’ and an ‘imaginary’ part) and on trigonometry. He lived all his life in England and was an intimate of Isaac Newton. He died in 1754 at the age of 87 in curious circumstances, befitting his calling.

The manner of de Moivre’s death has a certain interest for psychologists. Shortly before it, he declared that it was necessary for him to sleep some ten minutes or a quarter hour longer each day than the preceding one: the day after he had thus reached a total of something over twenty-three hours he slept up to the limit of twenty-four hours, and then died in his sleep.
Beef and ale
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

‘Possession’s beef and ale’ sang Oliver Goldsmith, and the great German chemist, Justus von Liebig (1803-73), had a hand in promoting both. Liebig was the most celebrated organic chemist of his time. He was a combative man with a quick temper, and even his occasional spasms of generosity had a calculating edge. Liebig’s school at the University of Giessen, described by a French rival as ‘an evil hole’, gave rise to many of the chemical luminaries of the next generation. Unusually for a German professor of the period, Liebig sometimes allowed his students to publish by themselves, for, he confided to a friend in a letter, ‘if it is something good, a part of the credit is ascribed to me and I do not need to defend the mistakes. You understand?’
Monsieur LeBlanc’s solicitude
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Sophie Germain (1776-1831) left her mark on both pure and applied mathematics. Among her achievements was a fundamental study of the theory of elasticity. She was born into a prosperous French bourgeois family with intellectual leanings. Her father’s library was Sophie’s university, and it was there that she read about Archimedes and his death at the hands of a Roman soldier [26]. From that moment Archimedes became her hero and mathematics her avocation. But it was not long before her questing intelligence transcended the material in the family library and she decided that she must learn from the best mathematicians of the day by correspondence. Her most loyal pen-friend was the French mathematician, Adrien-Marie Legendre, with whom she engaged in a voluminous exchange of letters on everything from number theory to topology. She also turned to the greatest mathematician of the day, Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855).
The etnperor and the scientist
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Napoleon I was a friend to science. He was patron to many of France’s leading scholars, and several of the most distinguished, such as the mathematician and physicist Gaspard Monge, and the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, were privileged members of his ill-starred Egyptian expedition. French scientists saw themselves and their brethren in other lands as citizens of the world. So it was that Humphry Davy [123], for instance, was allowed to travel unmolested through France at the height of the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon’s regard for men of science can be gauged from an episode relating to Edward Jenner.
The crackle that made history
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

In January of 1891 Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, opined in a newspaper interview that ‘we have done as much with wireless telegraphy as is likely to be done’. Ten years later, on a windswept eminence in Newfoundland, Guglielmo Marconi clasped a telephone receiver to his ear and heard above the crackle of static a signal cast into the void at Poldhu in Cornwall 1,800 miles away. Preece had asserted—and many experts agreed with him— that ‘bridging the Atlantic’ was a pipedream, for ‘the curvature of the earth will send the waves out into space’. Preece, it must be said, seems to have enjoyed a remarkable record where prediction was concerned. When Alexander Graham Bell exhibited his first telephone Preece gave evidence before a committee of the House of Commons. His confident evaluation was: ‘Americans have need of this invention, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.’ (Americans, by contrast, were on the whole cautiously optimistic. ‘One day’, said the mayor of Chicago after witnessing a demonstration of the instrument, ‘there will be one in every city.’ A Senator, on the other hand, when told that Maine would soon be able to speak to Texas, riposted, ‘What should Maine have to say to Texas?’)
Pomposity and circumstance
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Samuel Pierpont Langley (1831-1906) was an American physicist of high standing, though not as lofty as he believed. He was Professor of Physics in Pittsburgh and director of the Allegheny Observatory. Langley was notoriously pompous and self-important, with an unshakeable faith in his infallibility. Here is a recollection by Sir Arthur Schuster [159], Professor of Physics at Manchester University, who himself made many important contributions, especially in the field of spectroscopy:

Langley’s invention of the bolometer [an instrument for the measurement of radiant heat], and his pioneer work in the construction of the flying machine, are achievements sufficiently great to ensure a reputation which will outweigh the recollection of defects due to an exaggerated consciousness of dignity, accompanied by a marked inability to see the humorous side of things. I first met Langley on the occasion of the total solar eclipse in August 1878, when he established an observing station on the top of Pike’s Peak in order to obtain, if possible, a measure of the thermal radiation of the solar corona. Unfortunately he suffered severely from mountain sickness, and had to be carried down before the day of the eclipse.
The use of vacations
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Here is how Louis Pasteur (1822-95) came upon one of the main tenets of vaccination. It illustrates perfectly his famous maxim that fortune favours the prepared mind: he had been studying fowl cholera in chickens and interrupted his work by a vacation. when he returned he tested the cultures of the cholera bacteria and found that they had become inactive, in fact had died: subcultures (growth media seeded with bacteria from the original cultures) did not grow and the birds into which they were injected developed no sign of disease. Pasteur prepared to start over with new cultures, but instead of merely abandoning the abortive experiment, he decided, for no reason that he could articulate, to re inject the same birds with a new, active culture, One of his colleagues reported the outcome:

To the surprise of all, and perhaps even of Pasteur, who was not expecting such success, nearly all these fowls withstood the inoculation, although fresh fowls succumbed after the usual incubation period.
Potholes on the path to fame
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Werner Heisenberg was one of the small band of theoreticians who wrought the revolution in physics during the first half of the old century. Born in 1901, he was in his early twenties when he constructed a mathematical foundation for quantum mechanics. His patron at the University of Munich, Arnold Sommerfeld, recognized Heisenberg’s genius and did all he could to promote his career. By the time he came to present his doctoral dissertation Heisenberg had already solved some formidably difficult theoretical problems, but his exploits in the laboratory had been less spectacular.

A certain tension prevailed in the Munich physics department between Sommerfeld and the professor of experimental physics, Wilhelm Wien. Wien disapproved of his colleague’s laissez-faire attitude to the training of research aspirants. Although no mean theoretician himself, Wien had won his Nobel Prize in 1911 for his experimental studies on radiation from hot objects, and he observed with disapproval the conceptual convulsions that were eroding the foundations of classical physics. He had set Heisenberg a problem, as part of his doctoral course of training, which involved the measurement of the wavelengths of lines in the spectrum of mercury vapour, split into two components under the action of a magnetic field (the so-called Zeeman effect).
Humboldt’s stratagem
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac [136] was an illustrious French chemist, remembered for, amongst many other achievements, his law relating the combining volumes of gases—an important advance in atomic theory. He was assisted in this work by the young Alexander von Humboldt [134]. Their experiments necessitated special thin-walled reaction vessels, which had to be procured from Germany. Humboldt applied his native ingenuity to the problem of evading customs duty on the imports, which at that time was exceptionally steep. He instructed the German glass-blowers to seal the long necks of the vessels and label the containers: Handle with care—German air. The French douaniers had no instructions concerning duty on ‘German air’ and so let the consignment through.
New Theories of Everything
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

Will we ever discover a single scientific theory that tells us everything that has happened, and everything that will happen, on every level in the Universe? The quest for the theory of everything - a single key that unlocks all the secrets of the Universe - is no longer a pipe-dream, but the focus of some of our most exciting research about the structure of the cosmos. But what might such a theory look like? What would it mean? And how close are we to getting there? In New Theories of Everything, John D. Barrow describes the ideas and controversies surrounding the ultimate explanation. Updating his earlier work Theories of Everything with the very latest theories and predictions, he tells of the M-theory of superstrings and multiverses, of speculations about the world as a computer program, and of new ideas of computation and complexity. But this is not solely a book about modern ideas in physics -- Barrow also considers and reflects on the philosophical and cultural consequences of those ideas, and their implications for our own existence in the world. Far from there being a single theory uniquely specifying the constants and forces of nature, the picture today is of a vast landscape of different logically possible laws and constants in many dimensions, of which our own world is but a shadow: a tiny facet of a higher dimensional reality. But this is not to say we should give up in bewilderment: Barrow shows how many rich and illuminating theories and questions arise, and what this may mean for our understanding of our own place in the cosmos.
Initial Conditions
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

Laws of Nature tell us how things change. Yet behind them we believe there to lurk invariances that straitjacket reality. Nature can do whatever she pleases so long as these charmed quantities stay the same throughout the change. The Theory of Everything seeks to provide us with the ultimate directory of all possible changes. The guiding principle in the search for this all-controlling formula is that it must be a single law, not a collection of different pieces. The logical unity of the Universe demands a single invariance that remains unchanged in the face of all the complexity and transience we see about us from the smallest sub-atomic scales to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Constants of Nature
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

There is something attractive about permanence. We feel instinctively that things that have remained unchanged for centuries must possess some attribute that is intrinsically good. They have stood the test of time. Our religious beliefs have traditionally focused upon the confidence that can be placed in an unchanging Supreme Being whose invariance ‘yesterday, today, and forever’ is thus a guarantee for the future. And, despite the constant flux of changing events, we feel that the world possesses some invariant bedrock whose general aspect remains the same.
Broken Symmetries
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

Despite the popular notion that the work of the scientist is discovery—the creation of new ideas and the discovery of new facts about the Universe—many of the books and articles that scientists publish are devoted to a third enterprise: the refinement of existing ideas into simpler, more intuitively embraceable forms, the effacement of the complex into the trivial.

When a new and deep idea is discovered for the first time, it may well appear in a cumbersome language principally designed to express some quite different set of ideas.
Government And Society
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

We are concerned in this book with the history of England during the reigns of the six kings who followed William the Conqueror—his two sons, William Rufus and Henry I, his grandson Stephen, and the early Plantagenets, Henry II and his two sons Richard I and John. The period also covers the years between two of the most famous documents of English history, we might say of all medieval history for they are unique, unparalleled in Europe—Domesday Book and Magna Carta. The accession of one bad king in 1087 and the death of another in 1216 arepurely incidental and of little or no historical importance; the documents mark epochs. Widely as they differ in character (and perhaps they have nothing else in common than their fame) they are alike in this: succeeding generations appealed to them as monuments only a little less authoritative than the Bible.
Rural Conditions
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

It is an idle task to attempt anything like an exact estimate of the population of England during the middle ages. Domesday Book (1086) provides some basis for calculation, but only a very unsatisfactory one. For, apart from the total omission of the four northern counties and part of Lancashire, of London, Winchester, Bristol, and some other towns, whole classes are either altogether excluded or only casually introduced. Thus few of the clergy, a negligible number of women, and no children are recorded in the returns. If a census of the population had been taken in any year of the twelfth century, it would probably have ranged, at a rough guess, round the two million mark. The natural tendency to grow was to some extent counteracted by unsanitary conditions, by plague, pestilence, and famine, and, though there are perceptible signs of increase during the period, the population can scarcely ever have much exceeded two and a half million souls. Of these the town dwellers still represented a relatively insignificant, though increasing, proportion. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the country lived in villages and were engaged in agriculture and its attendant occupations.
Justice And Finance
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

It has been rightly said’ that in the last years of the twelfth century law becomes articulate. For certain legal purposes in the middle ages 3September1189, the date of the coronation of Richard I, was taken as the limit of legal memory. So by the statute of Q,uo Warranto of 1290 Edward I agreed that those who could prove that they had enjoyed their franchises continuously since that date had a prescriptive right to them. A few years earlier we have the first reasoned account of legal procedure in the treatise De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliae attributed to Henry II’s justiciar Rannulf Glanvill. A few years later, from 1194 to be more precise, we have legal records, plea rolls, notes taken down by clerks who were themselves present in the king’s court.2 In the early years of the thirteenth century these records become abundant. It will therefore be convenient at the point we have now reached, the year 1204, the year in which Normandy ceased to be a possession of the English Crown, to review the developments in the sphere of law which have set a significant and enduring mark on the judicial system of future centuries.
Era of Revolution
Authors: Gartner Lloyd P
Published: November 2023

The 1780s, when many Haskalah ideas began to reach practical realization, were a stirring decade for the advocates of change. Internal criticism of contemporary Jewish life became more outspoken and former Haskalah suggestions were rephrased as demands. New laws in the spirit of tolerance were enacted and hailed as a gracious benefit to the Jews. Maskilimreceived monarchical backing for projects to make their people ‘useful’ subjects.
Sages, sophists, and philosophers: Greek wisdom literature
Authors: Nightingale Andrea Wilson
Published: November 2023

The Greek thinkers in the archaic and classical periods performed their wisdom in different ways and in front of different audiences. As a modern audience that encounters these ‘philosophers’ only in written works, we tend to disconnect their doctrines from their historical and cultural contexts. By focusing on philosophic ‘performances’ of wisdom—both oral and written—and by examining the audiences addressed by these thinkers, we can better appreciate their lives and activities and, indeed, their different conceptions of the nature of wisdom.