Presents the inside story of the creation of the atomic bomb in terms understandable to the layman, and discusses the crisis of conscience following the demonstration of the bomb's destructive effects on Hiroshima.

Development of the Physicist's Conception of Nature P. A. M. Dime When one looks back over the development of physics, one sees that it can be pictured as a ...

This is a highly interdisciplinary book straddling physics and complex systems such as living organisms. The presentation is from the perspective of physics, in a manner accessible to those interested in scientific knowledge integrated within its socio-cultural and philosophical backgrounds. Two key areas of human understanding, namely physics and conscious complex systems, are presented in simple language. An optional technical presentation is also given in parallel where it is needed.

Do physicists believe that general relativity is true, and that electrons and phonons exist, and if so, in what sense? To what extent does the spectrum of positions among physicists correspond to philosophical positions like scientific realism, instrumentalism, or perspectivism? Does agreement with these positions correlate with demographic factors, and are realist physicists more likely to support research projects purely aimed at increasing knowledge? We conducted a questionnaire study to scrutinize the philosophical stances of physicists. We (...) received responses from 384 physicists and 151 philosophers. Our main findings are (1) On average, physicists tend toward scientific realism, and slightly more so than philosophers of science. (2) Physicists can be clustered into five groups. Three show variants of scientific realism, one is instrumentalist, and one seems undecided or incoherent. (3) Agreement with realism weakly correlates with approval of building a bigger particle collider. (4) Agreement with realism weakly correlates with the seniority of physicists. (5) We did not find correlations with other factors, such as whether physicists focus on theoretical or experimental research and whether they engage with applied or basic research. (shrink)

The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

Kernphysiker in einer neuen Welt: Die Emigranten der dreißiger Jahre in Amerika. - Unter der großen Anzahl derjenigen, die durch Nationalsozialismus zur Emigration gezwungen wurden und zwischen 1933 und 1941 in die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika einwanderten, befanden sich auch mehr als hundert Physiker, und unter ihnen einige der genialsten Kernphysiker der Welt. Die Physik in Amerika hatte damals den Status einer voll ausgereiften Wissenschaft erreicht, und so kam es zu einem bedeutsamen und facettenreichen Zusammenwirken zwischen den emigrierten und den (...) einheimischen Kernphysikern, zumal sie die verschiedenen Forschungsgebiete vertraten, die sich durch die Entdeckungen und Erfindungen des Jahres 1932 (Neutron, Deuterium, Positron, Cockcroft-Walton-Beschleuniger, Zyklotron) aufgetan hatten. Von besonderer Bedeutung Für die Konsolidierung und Entwicklung der gesamten Kernphysik war dabei die Veröffentlichung von drei Artikeln in den Reviews of Modern Physics von 1936 und 1937, bekannt als die „Bethe-Bibel”︁. Nach der Entdeckung der Kernspaltung von 1938 und dem Ausbruch des Krieges 1939 in Europa wirkte die Befürchtung, daß Hitler eine Atomwaffe erhalten könnte, als mächtige, Emigranten und Nicht-Emigranten gleichermaßen erfassende einigende Kraft unter den Atomphysikern in Amerika, und die meisten von ihnen stellten ihre Fähigkeiten in den Dienst der US-Regierung und arbeiteten am Manhatten-Projekt und an anderen militärischen Forschungsvorhaben mit. Bei Kriegsende waren die in den dreißiger Jahren emigrierten Kernphysiker wie so viele Flüchtlinge vor ihnen Amerikaner geworden, und keiner von ihnen kehrte in sein Geburtsland zurück.Among the large number of refugees from Nazism and Fascism entering the United States between 1933 and 1941 were more than 100 physicists, including some of the most gifted nuclear physicists in the world. By that time physics in America had come of age, and a remarkable and multifaceted symbiosis occurred between the émigré and native-born nuclear physicists as they pursued the many avenues of research opened up by the discoveries and inventions of 1932 (neutron, deuterium, positron, Cockcroft-Walton accelerator, cyclotron). Of particular importance for the consolidation and development of the entire field of nuclear physics was the publication in 1936–37 of the three articles in the Revieus of Modern Physics known as the „Bethe Bible”︁. With the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, the fear that a nuclear weapon might fall into Hitler's hands served as a powerful unifying force among nuclear physicists in Amerika, émigrés and non-émigrés alike, and most placed their talents in the service of the United States Government working on the Manhattan Project and other wartime research. By the end of the war, like so many refugees before them, the émigré nuclear physicists of the 1930s had become Americans, and not one of them returned to the country of his birth. (shrink)

The physicist not only observes phenomena, but he also has an active role in the formulation of some laws. For instance, laws involving irreversibility refer explicitly to what can or cannot be done by physicists. As the abilities of the latter may vary, we obtain sequences of laws, the convergence of which is discussed.

In this paper I investigate two views of theoretical explanation in quantum chemistry, advocated by John Clarke Slater and Charles Coulson. Slater argued for quantum‐mechanical rigor, and the primacy of fundamental principles in models of chemical bonding. Coulson emphasized systematic explanatory power within chemistry, and continuity with existing chemical explanations. I relate these views to the epistemic contexts of their disciplines.

Traditionally, historians have taken it for granted that Britain’s National Physical Laboratory was created as the result of demands from a “professional” body of university-based physicists for a state-funded scientific institution. Yet paying detailed attention to the history of the NPL’s originating institution, Kew Observatory, shows that the story is not so clear-cut. Starting in the 1850s, Kew Observatory was partly a center for testing meteorological instruments and other scientific equipment in return for fees. Long after the 1850s, the (...) observatory was run by self-funded devotees of science. Paid university physicists only assumed a dominant role on its governing committee in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, by which time instrument-testing was already the observatory’s main role. This paper argues that the rise of the university physicists – together with the desire of some of these physicists for a national institution that tested electrical standards – can only partially explain the origins of the NPL, and that Kew was in some ways a national physical laboratory before there were many physics teaching posts in British universities. This paper is a case study that illustrates a need to reassess the importance of university physicists in shaping British science at the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This book is a cultural phenomenology of doing physics. It describes the ways physicists actually do their work--their motives, and their ways of making sense of the world--so that outsiders can understand it. Martin H. Krieger explains that physicists employ a small number of everyday notions to get at the world experimentally and conceptually.

The aim of this paper is to invalidate the hypothesis that human consciousness is necessary in the quantum measurement process. In order to achieve this target, I propose a considerable modification of the Schrödinger’s cat and the Dead-Alive Physicist thought experiments, called “PIAR”, short for “Physicist Inside the Ambiguous Room”. A specific strategy has enabled me to plan the experiment in such a way as to logically justify the inconsistency of the above hypothesis and to oblige its supporters to rely (...) on an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics in which a real world of phenomena exists independently of our conscious mind and where observers play no special role. Moreover, the description of the measurement apparatus will be complete, in the sense that the experiment, given that it includes also the experimenter, will begin and end exclusively within a sealed room. Hence, my analysis will provide a logical explanation of the relationship between the observer and the objects of her/his experimental observation; this and a few other implications will be discussed in the fourth section and in the conclusions. (shrink)

The central thesis of this paper is that physicists have as much to learn from scientifically oriented philosophy as philosophers have to learn from physics. To begin with, any discussion of basic physical ideas and procedures is bound to be conducted in the light of some philosophy or other. Now, the standard philosophy of physics of our century is operationism. And philosophers, with the help of recent developments in semantics, epistemology and the theory of scientific inference, have shown that (...) operationism is untenable. Thus most physicists are dragging a dead philosophy that may not be of any help in conceiving of new ideas and procedures. This, then, is a first contribution philosophy can make to physics, namely to overhaul its philosophy. A second contribution is to the organization of physics, in particular to the axiomatic reconstruction of physical theories and the analysis and validation of empirical procedures. The various theses and antitheses discussed in the article are illustrated with examples taken from contemporary physics. (shrink)

When the layman reads a book or two of popularized physics and then moves solemnly forth, as occasionally happens, to expound some comprehensive doctrine purporting to be built directly out of the materials he has picked up, the type of comment which the physicist will make is plain enough in advance. But why does it so rarely occur to the physicist that others may think of his epistemologizing much what he is sure to think of their quantizing?

This book explores the rise of theoretical physics in 19th century Germany. The authors show how the junior second physicist in German universities over time became the theoretical physicist, of equal standing to the experimental physicist. Gustav Kirchhoff, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Max Planck are among the great German theoretical physicists whose work and career are examined in this book. Physics was then the only natural science in which theoretical work developed into a major teaching and research specialty in (...) its own right. Readers will discover how German physicists arrived at a well-defined field of theoretical physics with well understood and generally accepted goals and needs. The authors explain the nature of the work of theoretical physics with many examples, taking care always to locate the research within the workplace. The book is a revised and shortened version of Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, a two-volume work by the same authors. This new edition represents a reformulation of the larger work. It retains what is most important in the original work, while including new material, sharpening discussions, and making the research more accessible to readers. It presents a thorough examination of a seminal era in physics. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide the first in-depth discussion of Susan Stebbing’s views concerning our experience of the passage of time – a key issue for many metaphysicians writing in the first half of the twentieth century. I focus on Stebbing’s claims about the passage of time in Philosophy and the Physicists and her disagreement with Arthur Eddington over how best to account for that experience. I show that Stebbing’s concern is that any attempt to provide a scientific account (...) of the passage of time will face problems, since the events described by physics are necessarily measured against the passage of time. I then identify views elsewhere in her philosophical corpus that can help shed light on this claim. Ultimately, I argue, Stebbing’s views on time should be construed as part of her wider commitment to ‘realism’. To be a realist, for Stebbing, is to accept a set of propositions which are a pre-requisite for even beginning to analyse the world around us. For Stebbing, I argue, part of what it means to be a realist is to accept our experience of the passage of time as something fundamental that cannot itself be subject to analysis. (shrink)

This biography provides a stimulating and coherent blend of scientific and personal narratives describing the many achievements of the theoretical physicist Herbert Fröhlich. For more than half a century, Fröhlich was an internationally renowned and much respected figure who exerted a decisive influence, often as a 'man ahead of his time', in fields as diverse as meson theory and biology. Although best known for his contributions to the theory of dielectrics and superconductivity, he worked in many other fields, his most (...) important legacy being the pioneering introduction quantum field-theoretical methods into condensed matter physics in 1952, which revolutionised the subsequent development of the subject. Gerard Hyland has written an absorbing and informative account, in which Herbert Fröhlich's magnetic personality shines through. (shrink)

This contribution is a translated, edited and much abbreviated version of chapter 2 in Andreas Losch, Jenseits der Konflikte. I thank the publisher Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht for the permission to make use of the material.

An analysis is made of Pope Francis’ Encyclical Laudato Si from a general systems approach. A call is made for a dialogue between theologians and environmental scientist. A parallel is found between the Pope’s identification of rapidification as a root cause of global warming and McLuhan’s notion of the speedup of modern life due to the emergence of electric technology. An analysis of Hebrew Scriptures is made, suggesting that rather than subduing the earth, the translation of Gen 1:28 seems to (...) indicate that the intention was to occupy and tend the land. The Jewish notion of Bal Tashchit one of the 613 mitzvos or commandments from Scripture, supports this interpretation as it calls for stewardship of G-d’s gifts. (shrink)

상대성이론의 역사에서 베르그손과 푸앵카레는 주목받지 못했다. 두 인물은 상대성이론이 제시하는 개념들에 대해 표준적인, 즉 아인슈타인과 다른 해석을 제시했다는 공통점을 지닌다. 논문에서 나는 우선 베르그손이 어떻게 특수상대성이론의 핵심적인 논변으로부터 유일하고 보편적인 시간이라는 공통관념을 이끌어내고 또 이론의 핵심 개념 중 하나인 동시성을 이해하는지 보인다. 다음으로는 푸앵카레가 어떻게 자신의 공간론에서 상대공간의 개념과 그 적용으로서 상대시간 개념을 이끌어내고 또 그 전제가 되는 상대성원리를 이해하는지 살핀다. 이로부터 상대성이론의 형성 및 해석의 역사에서 베르그손과 푸앵카레의 위치를 재평가하고, 나아가 두 철학의 비교 연구를 위한 초석을 마련하는 것이 이 (...) 논문의 목적이다. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to refute the hypothesis that the observer’s consciousness is necessary in the quantum mechanics measurement process. In order to achieve our target, we propose and investigate a variation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment called “DAP”, short for “Dead-Alive Physicist”, in which a human being replaces the cat. This strategy enables us to logically disprove the consistency of the above hypothesis, and to oblige its supporters either to be trapped in solipsism or to rely (...) on an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the conscious observer plays the sole role of acknowledging the experimental results. Our analysis hence provides support to clarify the relationship between the observer and the objects of her/his experimental observation; this and a few other implications are discussed in the fourth section and in the conclusions. (shrink)

New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2007.