bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Comfort in adversity
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Physical handicap has been known to ignite, rather than extinguish, the ambition to learn and discover. Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and occupant of Newton’s Lucasian Chair of Mathematics in Cambridge, embodies this truth. Consider also Solomon Lefschetz (1884-1972), the much-admired American topologist, who, destined to be an engineer until both his hands were severed in a laboratory accident, turned instead to mathematics. He was fitted with pros thetic claws, always sheathed in black gloves. A student was charged with thrusting a stick of chalk into one claw at the beginning of the working day and taking out the stub at its conclusion.
Prison and the madhouse are scarcely the most congenial environments for the advancement of learning. Yet science has flowered after a fashion in internment and prisoner-of-war camps, and even captives in solitary confinement have added new chapters to human knowledge. Jean Victor Poncelet (1788-1867), a French mathematician, was perhaps the most celebrated of these indomitable spirits. An officer in the Corps of Military Engineers in the Napoleonic campaigns, he was captured by the Russians after a skirmish during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 and incarcerated in a camp at Saratov on the Volga river. There he remained for nearly two years. To divert himself he turned his mind to his youthful interest, mathematics, and especially geometry. Having, in the absence of books, reconstructed the elements of the subject from the beginning, he set out on a programme of research on projections of conic forms. This set the course for his most important later work, which he pursued after his release, while continuing to serve as a military engineer—a specialist in fortifications. Late in his life he published his definitive work, Applications d’analyse et de la g éometric, the first volume of which bore the title, Cahiers de Saratov.
Nemesis in Nancy
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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.