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This volume is an important study for understanding the complex interconnections between basic science and its sources of economic support in the period between the two world wars. The focus of the study is on the Institute for Theoretical Physics (later renamed the Niels Bohr Institute) at Copenhagen University, and the role of its director, the eminent Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, in the funding and administration of the Institute. Under Bohr's direction, the Copenhagen Institute was a central workplace in the development and the formulation of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and later became an important center for nuclear research in the 1930s. Dr. Aaserud brings together the scholarhip on the internal origins and development of nuclear physics in the 1930s with descriptions of the concurrent changes in private support for international basic science, particularly as represented by Rockefeller Foundation philanthropy. In the process, the book places the emergence of nuclear physics in a larger historical context. This book will appeal to historians of science, physicists, and advanced students in these areas.
This book presents unpublished excerpts from extensive correspondence between Niels Bohr and his immediate family, and uses it to describe and analyze the psychological and cultural background to his invention of the quantum theory of the atom.
Weird Scientists is a sequel to Men of Manhattan. As I wrote the latter about the nuclear physicists who brought in the era of nuclear power, quantum mechanics (or quantum physics) was unavoidable. Many of the contributors to the science of splitting the atom were also contributors to quantum mechanics. Atomic physics, particle physics, quantum physics, and even relativity are all interrelated. This book is about the men and women who established the science that shook the foundations of classical physics, removed determinism from measurement, and created alternative worlds of reality. The book introduces fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics, roughly in the order they were discovered, as a launching point for describing the scientist and the work that brought forth the concepts.
Mathematics has for centuries been stimulated, financed and credited by military purposes. Some mathematical thoughts and mathematical technology have also been vital in war. During World War II mathematical work by the Anti-Hitler coalition was part of an aspiration to serve humanity and not help destroy it. At present, it is not an easy task to view the bellicose potentials of mathematics in a proper perspective. The book presents historical evidence and recent changes in the interaction between mathematics and the military. It discusses the new mathematically enhanced development of military technology which seems to have changed the very character of modern warfare.
"Drawing extensively from archival sources and in-depth interviews, Kelly Moore examines the features of American science that made it an attractive target for protesters in the early cold war and Vietnam eras, including scientists' work in military research and activities perceived as environmentally harmful. She describes the intellectual traditions that protesters drew from - liberalism, moral individualism, and the New Left - and traces the rise and influence of scientist-led protest organizations such as Science for the People and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Moore shows how scientist protest activities disrupted basic assumptions about science and the ways scientific knowledge should be produced, and recast scientists' relationships to political and military institutions."--Jacket.