bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Smoking for the Führer
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Fritz Houtermans’s career was the stuff of fiction. He was German by birth but grew up and studied in Vienna. He was a physicist with, according to his friend Otto Frisch [20], a profound understanding of quantum theory. He pursued his theoretical work in Viennese cafes, where his prodigious capacity for coffee became legendary. His growing reputation took him to Germany, to one of the great centres of theoretical physics in Gottingen. Houtermans was one-quarter Jewish, so that, although he was proud of his ancestry’—’when your ancestors were still living in the trees’, he would tell his Aryan colleagues, ‘mine were already forging cheques’—he was not under threat of racial persecution by the Nazis. He was, however, a committed Communist and for many years a party member, and this would have put his life in danger. He therefore decamped to England, where he worked at the EMI laboratories, and all but discovered the laser (the means, first achieved in 1960, of generating light of a single wavelength with a very high intensity). But life in England was not to his taste and he complained especially’ about the smell of boiled mutton. He moved again, this time to fulfil his old ambition of working in the Soviet Union. He found employment in the Physico-Technical Institute in Kharkov, which then housed a brilliant cluster of physicists, among them the great Lev Landau 1137].
Baccy and quanta
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Although quantum theory had its origins in Albert Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect (for which, and not for relativity, he received the Nobel Prize), its indeterminacy was something Einstein could never accept. This was the origin of his famous assertion that the Lord does not play dice. If the Universe was ruled by chance, he said, he would rather be a croupier in a gambling casino than a physicist. Einstein [161] was not alone in his epistemological distaste. In 1913, two future winners of the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s then assistant, Otto Stern [6| and Max von Laue [112], while on a walk up the Utliberg near Zurich, shook hands on an oath, contemptuously dubbed by Wolfgang Pauli [25] the Utlischwur (an allusion to William Tell’s Rutlischwur—the oath that led to the union of the Swiss cantons): ‘If this nonsense of Bohr’s should in the end prove right we will leave physics.’ (They of course reneged.)
The country doctor, his captive, and the professor
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The history of physiology—and, of course, of medicine—is replete with examples of daring self-experimentation [85], Less often the fearless experimenters have used members of their family as captive guinea-pigs. Edward Jenner [143], the country doctor credited with discovering the means to inoculate against smallpox, was perhaps most famous of all those who engaged in such dubious practices. Here is a later and notably reckless example in which scientific curiosity took precedence over paternal concern. It led in 1894 to a seminal discovery in physiology:
Dr George Oliver, a physician of Harrogate, employed his winter leisure in experiments on his family, using apparatus of his own devising for clinical measurements. In one such experiment he was applying an instrument for measuring the thickness of the radial artery [in the arm]; and, having given his young son, who deserves a special memorial, an in jection of an extract of the suprarenal gland, prepared from material supplied by the local butcher, Oliver thought that he had detected a contraction or, according to some who have transmitted the story, an expansion of the radial artery. Whichever it was, he went up to London to tell Professor Schafer | Professor of Physiology’ at University’ College, later metamorphosed into Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer] what he thought he had observed, and found him engaged in an experiment in which the blood pressure of a dog was being recorded; found him, not unnaturally, incredulous about Oliver’s story and very impatient at the interruption.
The old melon
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Adolf von Baeyer (1835-1917) was a colossus in the great era of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century, one of the founders of the subject, in which German supremacy stood unchallenged. His laboratory in Munich was a Mecca for aspiring chemists from all over the world, one of whom, John Read [23], later professor in Aberdeen, offered some vignettes of life there in his book, Humour and Humanism in Chemistry. What follows is taken from Read’s review in Nature of a memoir about Baeyer and his times by one of his German associates. At the time of the events recorded here Baeyer had entered into a new area of organic chemistry; his affections were for the moment concentrated on two substances, both of them important and versatile intermediates in organic syntheses:
By means of a ‘Kunstgriff [a masterstroke] of which Baeyer was very proud (treatment with sodium amalgam in presence of sodium bicarbonate), the diketone was reduced to quinitol. At the first glimpse of the crystals of the new substance Baeyer ceremoniously raised his hat!
The errant compass
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) was Professor of Physics at the University of Copenhagen when he tried a lecture demonstration that changed the course of physics. Oersted was fascinated by magnetism and he did not hold with the prevailing view that magnetism and electricity were unrelated phenomena— fluids, as Ampere [17] had called them. Rather, he thought, they were forces radiated by all substances, which might well interfere with each other, and, indeed, it was well established that a compass in a ship, struck by lightning, would sometimes reverse its polarity. He conjectured, therefore, that a thin wire carrying an electric current might, when placed beside a compass needle, cause it to deflect.
For reasons never made clear Oersted chose to test his hypothesis before an audience at one of his lectures instead of first trying it out for himself. He had, he afterwards confessed, hesitated, for prudence suggested that the experiment might not, after all, work and he would look foolish; but on an impulse he went ahead all the same. Oersted sent the current through his thin platinum wire until it glowed. The compass was lying directly beneath, but before he could move it alongside the wire, the needle deflected. The effect was small and probably invisible to the audience, which manifested apathy, but Oersted was astonished: the current flowing in the direction of the needle s axis had deflected it sideways? How could this be?
The little green men who weren’t
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In 1967, Jocelyn Bell was a research student in Cambridge, her supervisor the astronomer Anthony Hewish. His interest at the time was quasars (quasi-stellar radio sources), very’ intense sources of radio emission and other radiation, discovered in 1963. They were, and to some extent remain, mysterious, but are now thought to be black holes—objects so heavy that they collapse inwards on themselves and, because of the density of matter in their interior, trap electromagnetic radiation as demanded by the Theory of Relativity. Because they are, in effect, point sources of radiation, they twinkle like any stars, by reason of disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere, which deflect the radiation this way and that before it reaches the telescope.
The magnitude of the radiowave twinkle would, Hewish thought, give a measure of the size of the object. He devised an array of radio detectors, spread across an area of more than four acres, which could measure intensity differences (twinkles) over time periods of fractions of a second. Jocelyn Bell, while making these measurements, experimented with the time periods and was astonished to find, when she inspected the recorder chart paper one morning, that the quasar source she was observing gave rise to a pulse of intensity every 1.34 seconds. Her first guess was that an output from some kind of machinery was imposing itself on the radio signals; but then she realized that that the quasar source, with its strange periodicity, entered the field of view of the telescope every 23 hours and 56 minutes, the period of rotation of Earth relative to the stars [107]. Surely any man-made device would have been set to a 24-hour cycle? Radio telescopes, on the other hand, were run on sidereal time, but no emission from any near at hand could be detected. What could be sending out pulses from the void with a regularity of one part in 10 million? Surely these must be signals from extraterrestrial intelligences! The source was accordingly designated LGM1 (for Little Green Men).
Crystal clear
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The particle-wave duality was perhaps the most startling outcome of the conceptual revolution that swept through physics during the first three decades of the twentieth century. That photons—the packets, or quanta, of light— behaved in some respects as particles, in others as waves, had already been noted when the due (later Prince) Louis de Broglie conjectured that the same might be true of other particles, such as electrons. Sitting in an eyrie in the Eiffel Tower as a meteorological observer during the First World War, de Broglie had time to ruminate on these matters and to develop an equation relating the momentum of the particle to its wavelength. This formed the substance of his doctoral dissertation, which he submitted to the University of Paris in 1924 and which earned him the Nobel Prize five years later.
Buffon’s balls of fire
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707—88) was a scholar of prodigious accomplishment. He is now remembered above all for his contributions to anatomy and zoological classification, but his interests embraced all of science, and his Histoire naturelle, published in 44 volumes, was an enduringly influential monument of scholarship. Buffon was rich, self-indulgent and imperious of demeanour. His intellectual audacity and self-assurance often led him into futile controversies, such as his long-running disputation with Thomas Jefferson and other American scholars; for he was convinced that a retarded state of evolution prevailed in North and South America.
Buffon had formed the idea that the American climate was damp and unhealthy, and that this had militated against the emergence of new species and had debauched those that already existed. This, he maintained, was evident from a comparison of the plants and animals common to the Americas and Europe, humankind included. In these views he was abetted by other French scholars, notably the Abbe Raynal and Corneille de Pauw. De Pauw wrote that much of America was covered by ‘putrid and death-dealing waters’ under a blanket of ‘fogs of poisonous salts’. Insects and venomous reptiles were huge and hideous; syphilis was an American disease, which corrupted both man and animals, and could be caught by merely breathing the pestilential air. Jefferson resolved to rebut these Gallic aspersions on his native land and to tackle Buffon, much the most respected of the defaniers.
Victorian vitality
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Victorian Britain was home to an army of naturalists. Some held professorial chairs of botany, zoology, geology, or palaeontology, but most were amateurs. This was pre-eminently the age of cataloguing of species and systematization. Learned societies arose and their meetings were crowded and sometimes occasions of uninhibited and passionate debate. Of the meetings of the Geological Society John Gibson Lockhart, the editor of an intellectual publication, commented: ‘Though I don’t care for geology, I do like to see the fellows tight*. The Victorians took their interests, not least in the wonders of nature, very seriously indeed and were willing, even eager, to suffer in their cause. William Buckland [13] and Adam Sedgwick, Professors of Geology at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, led their students on gruelling field trips and delivered lectures—in Sedgwick’s case, five in one day—on horseback.
Metal takes wing
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The name of Ludwig Mond (1839-1909) is linked to Imperial Chemical Industries and to a range of commercial chemical processes. Mond was one of the greatest applied chemists. He regarded a background in academic chemistry as an indispensable preliminary to an industrial career—he himself had worked in Baeyer’s laboratory in Munich [84] before emigrating to England, where he set up model commercial plants, run on benign and socially enlightened lines. Mond himself developed a series of ingenious industrial procedures. One of these generated ammonia for the Solvay soda works, which produced the important chemical, sodium carbonate. A by-product of the ammonia process was the so-called Mond gas, comprising mainly hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which was used as a smokeless fuel and for heating furnaces. Mond had also established a chlorine plant, but this was giving persistent trouble. In particular, the nickel stopcocks that controlled the passage of gas through the pipes became encrusted with a black deposit that soon blocked the flow. No such effect had been encountered in laboratory-scale experiments and Mond began to consider whether he should write off his losses and close the plant.
The Jesuits and the bomb
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Jesuits have always taken an interest in science. Among their ranks have been noted astronomers and astrophysicists, and indeed the astrophysical laboratory in the Vatican appears to have been established with the aim of seeking revelations from celestial meteorites. But in 1896 Father Frederick Odenbach of the fesuit College of St Ignatius in Cleveland, Ohio, developed an interest in the science of meteorology. This evidently did not long satisfy his scientific appetites, for by 1900 he had turned his attention to seismology. That year he constructed a seismograph and began to make observations. After working for some years the Father had a brainwave: the Jesuit order was represented in almost all countries and maintained regular contacts between its outposts.
A man’s world
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-79) was an astronomer of great lustre, who would undoubtedly have achieved even more had she not had to struggle against the prejudice of a hidebound profession. A Cambridge undergraduate just after the First World War, she intended at first to become a biologist, but physics formed part of her Natural Science Tripos course and so she found herself in the Cavendish Laboratory, terrorized by the predominantly misogynistic lecturers and demonstrators, especially Ernest Rutherford [16], at whose lectures she was forced, as the only woman, to sit by herself in the front row, the recipient of the great man’s Olympian ironies.
A slice of pi
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The nature of π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, has been a source of frustration and fascination to mathematicians and philosophers for millennia. It is obvious from the dimensions of the squares drawn inside and outside the circle and touching its circumference that π must be greater than 2 and less than 4, but there is nothing to indicate that it is an irrational number—one that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers. The value of π has been calculated on high-speed computers to billions of places of decimals, but no pattern or recurrence has emerged [30].
The savants and the chauvinists
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The planet Uranus, discovered by William Herschel in 1781 [156], began in the nineteenth century to cause concern to astronomers. Alexis Bouvard [145] discovered that its observed course was deviating from the predictions based on Newton’s laws, which took into account the gravitational influences of the Sun and of the other planets. Surely Newton’s laws could not be in error? Was there perhaps, then, another unidentified planet affecting its motion? In 1843, acting on this supposition, the youthful John Couch Adams, recently graduated from Cambridge, began to calculate what the orbit of such a planet would be. The problem had been considered intractable, but after some three years of labour Adams came up with a rough answer. When he took the results to the Reverend Professor John Challis, director of the Cambridge observatory and guardian of its telescope, he was fobbed off with the advice that he should apply to the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy. Sir George was also less than helpful: more detailed calculations, he told Adams, would be required before he was prepared to initiate a search for a planet. These took the exasperated Adams another year.
From mania to miracle
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Of all the drugs discovered in the past 50 years or so, lithium has probably done the most good. Lithium chloride, closely similar to sodium chloride, common salt, is taken in large quantities by those with clinical depression and related conditions. It is cheap, essentially devoid of long-term side-effects, and has made life tolerable for many desperate people. There is no logical route by which its efficacy could have been divined and it came into being by a bizarre train of faulty reasoning.
Dr John Cade was a psychiatrist in a small medical centre in Australia. He conceived the idea that manic disease is caused by an endogenous toxin. Were this so, one might then reasonably expect that, like many known toxins, it would be continually eliminated from the body and would show up in the urine. It was not an unreasonable conjecture, especially since there had been reports (albeit later disproved) of a characteristk component in the urine of schizophrenics. Cade decided to test for an excreted toxin by injecting the urine of his patients into guinea-pigs. The animals became sick, but equally so when normal control urine was injected. Cade did not repine, but took the curious step of trying pure urea, the primary excreted metabolic end-product that makes up the bulk of dissolved matter in urine. The guinea-pigs fared even worse, in fact died when quite low concentrations of urea were injected, presumably of kidney failure. In any case it turned out, not surprisingly, that the concentration of urea was no higher in the urine of patients than in that of normal subjects.
Madame la savante
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Gabrielle-Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet, born in 1706, was the first to render the published work of Isaac Newton [15] into French. Her translation, with explanations, of Newton’s most important work, the Principle^ established her reputation as a savante. It burst on the French intellectual scene like a bombshell, and very soon Newton’s explanation of planetary motion as governed by gravitational attraction had supplanted Descartes’s theory of ‘elementary vortices’ and had changed the direction of mathematical thought in France.
The gold standard
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The origin of the Earth’s magnetism was a source of fierce debate from the sixteenth century onwards. During the Second World War two distinguished British physicists were drawn into a project to combat the danger to Allied shipping of magnetic mines. Edward Bullard and Patrick Blackett fell to arguing as they worked, about terrestrial magnetism. At the war’s end both returned to Cambridge and continued to ponder the problem.
Blackett was much admired both as a theoretician and an ingenious experimenter, and later, in 1948, won a Nobel Prize. He had an unusual background: born into a seafaring family, he entered the Royal Navy as a cadet at the age of 13 and served through many of the engagements of the First World War. When peace returned he was chosen as one of a small group of junior career officers sent to Cambridge on a six-month course. Blackett had already by then demonstrated an exceptional technical facility and had devised a gunnery aid used throughout the Royal Navy. At Cambridge he went to visit the Cavendish Laboratory out of curiosity to see what a physics laboratory was like. Instantly smitten, he resigned his commission and enrolled in the university as a mature undergraduate. There he developed political interests and his sympathy with the Soviet Union was to keep him out of the British nuclear-bomb programme after the Second World War, although he had participated in the Manhattan Project in the United States. By the end of his life he was sitting on the Labour benches in the House of Lords as Lord Blackett of Chelsea; he died in 1974.
Margin of error
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Pyotr (or Peter) Leonidovich Kapitsa (or Kapitza) was a Russian physicist, whose formative years were spent at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge during Rutherford’s reign [16]. Kapitsa arrived in Cambridge as a young man, fresh from his studies in Moscow and sought an interview with Rutherford, for he had set his heart on working with the great man.
Rutherford refused to consider Kapitsa because the laboratory was already seriously overcrowded. Impetuously the young Russian asked him, ‘How many research students have you?’ ‘About thirty’, was the reply. ‘What is the customary accuracy of your experiments?’ was the next question, to which Rutherford replied, ‘About two or three percent’. ‘Well then’, Kapitsa beamed, ‘one more student would not even be noticed within that accuracy!’
Rutherford, so the story has it, could not resist such an ingenious appeal and Kapitsa soon became his favourite protege. Although Kapitsa had a strong streak of traditional Russian authoritarianism, which he exerted over those who later worked with him, he adored Rutherford. As a permanent member of the Cavendish, he did notable work on low-temperature physics. In 1934, on his annual visit to his family in Russia, he was detained on Stalin’s orders. Appeals to the Soviet government from colleagues and statesmen in the West were without avail. Kapitsa was installed in a laboratory in Moscow and informed that his duty was to the Soviet Union and not England or the international community. Rutherford eventually conceded defeat and had Kapitsa’s apparatus shipped to Moscow.
The lecturer’s craft
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Many of the world’s great scientists have been egregiously bad lecturers. The opacity of Niels Bohr’s public performances was legendary [31]. His friend Ernest Rutherford was an ebullient speaker [16], but would dissolve into incoherence when forced to manipulate algebraic equations. He would on occasion round angrily on his audience: ‘You all sit there like numskulls and not one of you will tell me where I’ve gone wrong!’ For others, more theoretically inclined, mathematical derivations were all too easy and the students would be left in a dazed state while the lecturer vaulted over the intermediate steps of an argument. It was related that the mathematician, G. H. Hardy [10], began his peroration to a lecture by the declaration: ‘It is now obvious that...’ Thereupon he stopped and turned to contemplate in silence the equations that he had written on the blackboard. After an interminable interval, he broke into a smile and reassured his listeners that it was indeed obvious.