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This chapter focuses on Lord Kelvin's works on atoms and molecules. He published his first paper on the subject in 1861 and his last in 1907. His first foray into atoms and molecules was to estimate their size. His investigation of molecular models, his opposition to kinetic theory, his introduction of gyrostatic molecules, studies on electrons and radioactivity, and lectures at Johns Hopkins University are discussed.

This chapter focuses on the legacy of Lord Kelvin. A century after his death, Kelvin's name is also associated with the Kelvin-Planck statement of the second law of thermodynamics, and several other effects, in particular the Joule-Kelvin effect. His substantial contributions to the development of physics during the 19th century, and his influence on the education of physicists, the application of physics, and the interactions between physicists and the political and service establishments are discussed.

This chapter presents a biography of William Thomson. Topics covered include his early years in Glasgow College, his experiences at Cambridge University, his election as the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow, creation of the Physical and Chemical Laboratories of University College North Wales, and his scientific achievements.

To try to understand better puzzles regarding economic fluctuations, this chapter presents an overview of collaborative research between economists and physicists, which is focused on applying ideas of statistical physics. Describing outliers is one of the inquiries conducted to determine its existence. Outliers are phenomena that lie outside of patterns of statistical regularity. Evidence consistent with the possibility that such outliers may not exist is reviewed. This possibility is supported by the extensive numerical analysis of a huge database, containing every trade, which results in power-law descriptions of a number of quantities whose fluctuations are of interest. It is also supported by recent analysis of Plerou et al. of a database containing the bid, the ask, and the sale price of each trade of every stock. Further, the Plerou et al. analysis is consistent with a possible theoretical framework for understanding economic fluctuations.

Philosophers and physicists provide two perspectives of a single object. They argue and contend, for they see with different eyes, each claiming that his own is clear and true. It is not realized that one may be not just caused by the other, but that they are linked more closely, because the two are dependent on each other. On the other hand, it is said that rather that dependence, time does exist in a temporal scheme, such as the past affects the future and not the other way around. The chapter discusses the conventionalist account of asymmetry, what it is and what the objections to it are, as well as the agreements about it. It probes individual perspectives and considers what is deemed to be factual.

The chapter shows how postwar poets encountered strong negative or idealized images of poetry in the writings of physicists and other scientists. Physicists sometimes referred to an abstraction of poetry in order to negotiate tricky questions about how to communicate the strangeness and “semi-phenomenological” character of the quantum world. Murray Gell-Mann coins the term “quark” partly because the allusion to Joyce enables him to finesse the questionable actuality of these sub-atomic particles. The chapter discusses the surprising prevalence of articles about poetry in general science journals aimed at professional scientists, and looks in detail at one article on contemporary poetry and science. Many poets read and referred to popular writings by Erwin Schröger and Werner Heisenberg. The chapter explains how their books appealed to poets because they referenced poetry, and talked about its possible future roles in relation to physics. Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan both found uses for the ideas of these physicists in their essays and poems. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how late in his career Oppenheimer reversed his earlier endorsement of Paul Dirac’s dismissal of poetry, by arguing that good scientific communication to the public would have the quality of lyric.

This chapter introduces the LHC project and its main motivation: the exploration of ‘zeptospace’. Zeptospace is a word invented in this book to designate the world as viewed at lengths of hundred billionths of billionths of a millimetre. Physicists expect that new particles and new phenomena (such as the Higgs boson, supersymmetry, or extra dimensions) exist in zeptospace. The chapter contains also a short synopsis of the book.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the validity of analyzing the chosen scientific community of physicists within the period 1945 to 1949 as the subject of a history of mentality (histoire des mentalités, Duby). Layers of mentality are suggested. After a brief survey of the existing methodological literature, it sets the historical stage of defeated Nazi Germany and lists the various components of the mentality of German physicists in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The final section identifies the sources upon which the book is based, centering around the representative periodical Physikalische Blätter, private correspondence by physicists, and testimony from exiles.

This chapter focuses on how a new branch of optics, now known as 'holography' grew from the work of Gabor, Denisyuk, Leith, and Upatnieks. This repackaging was slow and contentious, and led to priority disputes with George Stroke, a physicist at the University of Michigan who had been hired to liaise with the Willow Run personnel. While Leith, Upatnieks, and their colleagues extended and popularised the technique with engineers (many supported by the shadowy world of military applications), Stroke publicised it amongst optical scientists. This had the dual effect of rehabilitating Dennis Gabor's early work (for which he was to receive a Nobel Prize alone in 1971) and simultaneously clouding the contributions of the Willow Run investigators and patent rights.

Accounts and perceptions of particular subjects at Oxford University tend to concentrate on professors and central institutions. Not surprisingly, historians and contemporary commentators alike have formed judgements of ‘Oxford physics’ based on what went on in the Clarendon and Electrical Laboratories. However, Oxford's collegiate nature, the diversity of its scholarly community, and local peculiarities in the definition of disciplines, all require that a true description of Oxford physics embrace activity across a much larger and more complex territory. This chapter attempts to reconnoitre this uncharted hinterland, and sends up flares whenever physics and physicists are encountered. It shows how in a traditionally decentralized academic landscape, a discipline will have a widespread presence and even significant epicentres beyond the main facility, and sometimes utterly independent of it.

The SSC had to be “sold” to Congress and US taxpayers, for a project costing billions of dollars required strong public support. Central Design Group physicists kept Congress and its staffers informed about the project’s scientific goals with colorful brochures and frequent visits. But newspaper and magazine articles aimed at non-physicist readers typically emphasized the collider’s great size and high cost over its research. Other scientists (especially condensed-matter physicists) began questioning the project — ultimately before Congress. DOE officials also found the SSC a hard sell at foreign science agencies, especially in Europe. Partly to help build support for the project, DOE initiated a national SSC site-selection competition in 1987. Most states championed their “green-field” sites, while Illinois advocated building the collider adjacent to Fermilab, reusing its existing infrastructure. From the eight sites named as finalists in December 1987, DOE officials selected the Waxahachie, Texas, site in November 1988.

Establishing the SSC Laboratory near Dallas, Texas, proved much more difficult than anticipated. As Central Design Group leaders did not participate in construction, SSC Director Roy Schwitters turned increasingly to engineers from the US military-industrial complex to fill key posts, leading to clashes with high-energy physicists. A major SSC redesign resulted in cost overruns greater than $2 billion, as the estimated cost grew from $5.9 billion to $8.25 billion. This major cost increase soured relations with DOE officials, especially Secretary James D. Watkins, who began installing trusted lieutenants into SSC leadership positions, such as Edward Siskin as General Manager; it abetted perceptions of an alien, military-industrial culture at the lab. This cost overrun provided ammunition for Congressional SSC opponents, who began accusing the DOE and physicists of project mismanagement. These claims were partly valid, for SSC managers had been laggard in establishing and validating the required computerized project-management control system.

The Pythagoreans are presented by Aristotle in Chapter 5 as a sort of bridge between the physicists and the Platonists. They resemble the physicists in treating their principles as material, although with the striking innovation that these are conceived in mathematical terms; and they talk less obscurely than their predecessors about principles as such. The ontology presupposed by their thesis that ‘numbers are primary in nature’ and ‘constitute the whole heaven’ can be reconstructed from elsewhere in Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias. No less importantly, however, they anticipate the direction in which Socrates and Plato will take philosophy. Their principles — limit and unlimited — are not natures like fire or earth, but substances in their own right of the things of which they are predicated; and they made attempts, albeit superficial and confused, at definitions.

This chapter discusses the responses proposed by others to the challenge posed by Max Delbruck's provocative paper on the DNA replication problem. This occurred while Meselson and Stahl attended to more immediate tasks. At the time, responses appeared on two widely divergent levels. On an abstract plane that appealed particularly to physicists, there appeared topographical models suggesting alternatives to Delbruck's scheme for resolving the unwinding dilemma. On an experimental plane, some of the members of the phage network sought to trace the patterns of distribution of parental DNA molecules into progeny DNA. Somewhere between these levels, Jim Watson himself took Delbruck's objections seriously enough to think about alternative structures for DNA that might obviate the unwinding problem altogether.

This chapter illuminates the origins of the discussions in the Three-Man Paper (3MP), the nature of the personnel involved, or the reasons why genetics was the focus of these discussions. It details the close interaction of inquiries into two areas of research, genetics and photosynthesis, that provided the scientific context for the genesis of the 3MP. Several puzzles emerge in the examination of the list of participants and the possible reasons for organizing such a discussion. In light of this, the present chapter poses two questions: First, in view of Max Delbrück's intellectual biography prior to 1935, why was he the only physicist in the group to participate in a collaborative paper on genetics? Second, what is the basis for the linkage of quantum, and more specifically atomic, physics to genetics that emerges in the 3MP, and what made the linkage novel?