The Age of Innocence

Nuclear Physics between the First and Second World Wars
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-286555-7
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 512 Seiten, Format (B × H): 169 mm x 242 mm, Gewicht: 940 g

'Highly Recommended' CHOICE

A fascinating account of the experimental innovations and theoretical breakthroughs in nuclear physics in the period between the two world wars told through the lives and personalities of the physicists who made them.

The two decades between the first and second world wars saw the emergence of nuclear physics as the dominant field of experimental and theoretical physics, owing to the work of an international cast of gifted physicists. Prominent among them were Ernest Rutherford, George Gamow, the husband and wife team of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, Gregory Breit and Eugene Wigner, Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch, the brash Ernest Lawrence, the prodigious Enrico Fermi, and the incomparable Niels Bohr.

Their experimental and theoretical work arose from a quest to understand nuclear phenomena; it was not motivated by a desire to find a practical application for nuclear energy. In this sense, these physicists lived in an 'Age of Innocence'. They did not, however, live in isolation. Their research reflected their idiosyncratic personalities; it was shaped by the physical and intellectual environments of the countries and institutions in which they worked. It was also buffeted by the political upheavals after the Great War: the punitive postwar treaties, the runaway inflation in Germany and Austria, the Great Depression, and the intellectual migration from Germany and later from Austria and Italy.

Their pioneering experimental and theoretical achievements in the interwar period therefore are set within their personal, institutional, and political contexts. Both domains and their mutual influences are conveyed by quotations from autobiographies, biographies, recollections, interviews, correspondence, and other writings of physicists and historians.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stuewer, Roger H.

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Naturwissenschaften Physik Quantenphysik Kernphysik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Militärgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 1: Cambridge and the Cavendish

- 2: European and Nuclear Disintegration

- 3: Vienna and the Institute for Radium Research

- 4: The Cambridge-Vienna Controversy

- 5: The Quantum-Mechanical Nucleus

- 6: Nuclear Electrons and Nuclear Structure

- 7: New Particles

- 8: New Machines

- 9: Nuclear Physicists at the Crosswroads

- 10: Exiles and Immigrants

- 11: Artificial Radioactivity

- 12: Bet Decay Redux, Slow Neutrons, Bohr and his Realm

- 13: New Theories of Nuclear Reactions

- 14: The Plague Spreads to Austria and Italy

- 15: The New World

- 1: Cambridge and the Cavendish

- 2: European and Nuclear Disintegration

- 3: Vienna and the Institute for Radium Research

- 4: The Cambridge-Vienna Controversy

- 5: The Quantum-Mechanical Nucleus

- 6: Nuclear Electrons and Nuclear Structure

- 7: New Particles

- 8: New Machines

- 9: Nuclear Physicists at the Crossroads

- 10: Exiles and Immigrants

- 11: Artificial Radioactivity

- 12: Bet Decay Redux, Slow Neutrons, Bohr and his Realm

- 13: New Theories of Nuclear Reactions

- 14: The Plague Spreads to Austria and Italy

- 15: The New World

Über Autor(innen)

Roger H. Stuewer received a double Ph.D. major in history of science and physics at the University of Wisconsin and founded the Program in History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota where he is Professor Emeritus. He has held appointments at Boston University and Harvard University, and has been visiting professor at the Universities of Munich, Vienna, Graz, and Amsterdam. He received the Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics in 2013 and the Distinguished Alumni Award of the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin in 2014. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Association of Physics Teachers.