History Biographies, History, Philosophy of Physics

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The discussion highlights the often-overlooked contributions of lesser-known physicists in the field, emphasizing that many have made significant advancements without receiving the recognition they deserve. Participants express disappointment that only controversial figures tend to gain prominence, while countless others remain in obscurity. Various biographies and historical accounts of physicists are shared, including works on notable figures like the Curies and lesser-known scientists like Titus Pankey. The conversation also touches on the importance of collecting and sharing these narratives to enrich the understanding of physics history. Overall, the thread advocates for greater appreciation of all contributors to the field of physics.
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arXiv: physics.hist-ph. History, philosophy:

Berta Karlik -- The Grande Dame of the Vienna Radium Institute

Berta Karlik was an Austrian physicist who was not only among the early radioactivity researchers and nuclear physicists in Vienna, but also pioneered a woman's academic career in Austria. She was the first woman at the University of Vienna to acquire the venia legendi in physics, and the first full professor at a philosophical faculty in Austria. For almost thirty years she was the head of the Institute for Radium Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

I admit (to my shame)I haven't heard of her and I'm not gonna read it until tomorrow. But yeah....
 
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Science news on Phys.org
Hey, thanks! I've heard bits about her, but not the full story. It’s kind of disappointing how so many fascinating physicists fly under the radar. It seems like only the ones who stir up controversy with groundbreaking discoveries get all the limelight. But honestly, there are countless others who have poured their heart and soul into studying and progressing physics.
 
Yeah. It's as if the big names sometimes outshine some of the lesser ones, and I don't mean lesser in a professional capacity. All these other discoveries are important too. I'm ashamed to admit I still haven't even read the paper. (I have a habit of downloading stuff to my cellphone for reading should I be without net or similar. That's how far this paper has come. :) )

It reminds me of the Curies and I'll be surprised if not at least Marie Curie is mentioned in there somewhere.

Happy reading.
 
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arXiv: physics.hist-ph. History, biography.

Lars Brink: November 12, 1943 - October 29, 2022

We give some personal reflections on the person and scientist Lars Brink and on some of his scientific achievements. Our relations to Lars are briefly described in [1] and [2], while the sources relevant for this text are summarised in [3].
 
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I realize that with this one I'm veering out onto thin ice, but I've just been re-reading the military SciFi Schlock Mercernary, which has an in-universe setting where Terran millitary spaceships are referred to as "battleplates", are the size of e.g.: New York, and all named after major historical impact sites, such as for example Vredefort and Chicxulub crater.

The Evenki accounts of the 1908 Tunguska event collected in 1920s-1930s

Thus, I couldn't help myself.

-----

Here I'm back on track:

Biography of the French astronomer Henri Camichel


Regards.
 
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  • #10
It's of course pointless to point this one out right?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Everyone knows that one. I'll beware I don't veer too deep into philosophical metaphysics. We can't lower this forum's bar to the level of Stanford University's. That won't do. :P
 
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  • #13
pines-demon said:
So just to be clear, we share here articles about the biography of somebody (no matter the format)?

Here is one that I read recently about Titus Pankey, he is not that well known but still of great importance:
Titus Pankey and his groundbreaking supernova light curve
That's what I'm thinking yes. Any participation is welcome. It goes without saying that most of the content will come from "History and Philosophy" and the likewise more soft sections of Arxiv, as "Popular Physics" and the like. But if we try to keep it somewhat serious and not veer to far into metaphysics (and by any deity keep popular articles, e.g: phys.org, out of it) we'll collect some usable information. I guess blog posts from serious scientists would be ok as long as there's a real article at the bottom of it.

Regards.
 
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  • #15
math.HO. History.

More math-history. Looks like pretty heavy stuff but also interesting!
Emergence of Mathematics in Ancient India: A Reassessment

"This work explores a possible course of evolution of mathematics in ancient times in India when there was no script, no place-value system, and no zero. Reviewing examples of time-reckoning, large numbers, sacrificial altar-making, and astronomy, it investigates the role of concrete objects, natural events, rituals and names in context-dependent arithmetic, revealing its limited scope confined to counting, addition and subtraction. Higher operations, namely, multiplication, division and fractional calculations had to wait until the advent of symbolic numerals and procedures for computation. It is argued that the impression of these higher operations in a period usually known as the Vedic times is caused by inadvertent interpolation of present knowledge of mathematics in modern readings of the ancient texts."


The legacy of Bletchley Park on UK mathematics
 
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  • #17
https://www.webofstories.com/storytellers

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories

Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1981)
 
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  • #18
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pines-demon said:
Well it is always worth mentioning MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, it is mostly about mathematics but there are many physicist in the biographies.
Those archives are new to me so this thread already paid off.
 
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sbrothy said:
The history of the discovery of the physical quantum of action (Zur Geschichte der Auffindung des physikalischen Wirkungsquantums).

About the second law of mechanical heat theory (Über den zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Wärmetheorie)

I dunno about the second one but they seem to go together....

EDIT:

And well, this one sorta kinda smells a little of contemporary history.

Biophysics in Africa: challenges, priorities, and hopes
You are not providing enough information. The first two articles are translations of articles by Max Planck. The second is his thesis.
 
  • #25
Frabjous said:
You are not providing enough information. The first two articles are translations of articles by Max Planck. The second is his thesis.
No wonder I thought they went together :)

I may need to slow down a little.
 
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  • #26
Matter and cosmogenesis in Kant's Theory of the Heavens.

I just love it when physics explanations include god. I wonder if Kant meant that the heavens was "ein ding an sich" or perhaps some other thing. I'm sure he thought it was "dings" all the way down. :)

Newton may not have had the whole picture but at least he wasn't sitting in an armchair and guessing. I'm sure he got him good. Every time I've tried to read Kant I've been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of gibberish.

But then again we've already established I'm not that smart.
 
  • #27
Potentially interesting tidbits from Arxiv's physics.hist-ph (oldest first.)

The Compton scientific mission in Brazil in 1941: a perspective from national newspaper and documents of the time

Revisiting Taylor and the Trinity Test

An English Translation of Gröbli's Ph.D. Dissertation: "Specielle Probleme über die Bewegung geradliniger paralleler Wirbelfäden"

Richard Kirwan a [United] Irish Men of Science in Europe

(So I guess I'm enlarging the scope of the thread to physics history in general but I think everyone saw that coming.)

EDIT1:

Heh, 1. of April:

On the Superiority of the University of Arizona's Physics Club.

At least this time I noticed and wasn't taken for an embarrassing tour! :P
 
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Nice find. Very tasteful (is that the word? Sober maybe?).
 
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I liked Shing Tung Yao's autobiography The Shape Of A Life He started out as a hoodlum, later won the Fields medal.
 
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Fritz Haber is a fascinating and tragic figure. On one hand, his eponymous process saved 2.7 billion human lives by some estimates. However he also led the German chemical weapons program in World War One and developed Zyklon B, which the Nazis used some 25 years later to murder his surviving family members
 
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  • #32
More from Arxiv's physics.hist-ph

Swedish Beams -- The Story of Particle Accelerators in Sweden
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Did Louis de Broglie miss the discovery of the Schrödinger equation?
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E. Amaldi, C. Dilworth, G.P.S. Occhialini on F.G. Houtermans

Synopsis for this one as it doesn'y really say much in the title.

"In the Occhialini-Dilworth Archives of the University of Milan are preserved four typescripts by E. Amaldi, dealing with F.G. Houtermans, German physicist, who fled to the USSR to escape the Nazis. During a Stalinist purge he was arrested. The typescripts were sent to the two Milanese physicists so that they might give a judgement. G.S. Occhialini and C. Dilworth, in fact, had personally met Houtermans in 1934 and in 1950. The scenario is that of the role of nuclear physicists during the WW2. The exchange of letters between Amaldi and the two Milanese physicists will be analysed in order to identify possible influences on Amaldi. I will highlight Dilworth's contribution, which found room in a chapter of Amaldi's biography of Houtermans."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Regards.
 
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  • #33
  • #34
Yes. An Schrödinger was kinda one of the last naturalist philosophers wasn't he? He span widely. His "What is Life?" book springs to mind. Thank God he evaded the Nazis.
 
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sbrothy said:
Yes. An Schrödinger was kinda one of the last naturalist philosophers wasn't he? He span widely. His "What is Life?" book springs to mind. Thank God he evaded the Nazis.
Not sure if he was the last, what about Bell or Bohm? Many now work on quantum interpretations. Schrödinger is surely one of the last successful ones.

According to what I could find Klein, Gordon, Fock, de Broglie, de Donder, Schrödinger and more came up with Klein-Gordon equation in an attempt to find the Schrödinger's equation.
 
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Schrödinger harbored a harem in his home. I don't recall whether the count was two or three. The man who created the Wonder Woman character had a similar lifestyle.

When Schrödinger came up with his equation he didn't know that the values were related to probabilities.
 
  • #37
Hornbein said:
Schrödinger harbored a harem in his home. I don't recall whether the count was two or three. The man who created the Wonder Woman character had a similar lifestyle.

When Schrödinger came up with his equation he didn't know that the values were related to probabilities.
It is worse than that. He's got a record of having sexual encounters with minors. Rooms and buildings of some universities are no longer called "Schrödinger" for this reason.
 
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pines-demon said:
It is worse than that. He's got a record of having sexual encounters with minors. Rooms and buildings of some universities are no longer called "Schrödinger" for this reason.
News to me, but if true - and I seldom doubt two members on here being in agreement - that is indeed pretty disgusting. The man just went on my "list".
 
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BWV said:
Fritz Haber is a fascinating and tragic figure. On one hand, his eponymous process saved 2.7 billion human lives by some estimates. However he also led the German chemical weapons program in World War One and developed Zyklon B, which the Nazis used some 25 years later to murder his surviving family members
I saw a documentary on Einstein and remember Haber having a heart attack. Pretty sure he was portrayed as being remorseful that his talents were used to kill soldiers in the trenches.

I was wrong apparently

"during peace time a scientist belongs to the world, but during war time he belongs to his country". F. Haber.

His family founded of what was to become BASF, https://www.basf.com/global/en/who-we-are/history/chronology/1902-1924/1913.html
 
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My work with Millikan on the oil-drop experiment
by Harvey Fletcher
(Physics Today, June 1962)
http://www.ub.edu/hcub/hfq/sites/default/files/fletcher.pdf

I remember one of the (visitors to the lab) was the great Charles Steinmetz from the General Electric Company. He was one who did not believe in electrons. He could explain all the electrical phenomena in terms of a strain in the Ether. After watching these little oil droplets most of one afternoon, he came and shook my hand and said, shaking his head, "I never would have believed it. I never would have believed it" and then left.

Video by Dr. Jorge S. Diaz:

 
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  • #43
Swamp Thing said:
My work with Millikan on the oil-drop experiment
by Harvey Fletcher
(Physics Today, June 1962)
http://www.ub.edu/hcub/hfq/sites/default/files/fletcher.pdf



Video by Dr. Jorge S. Diaz:


I can appreciate their enthusiasm doing real, down-to-basics, bareboned physics. Applying both theory and experiment.

On top of that I can actually follow the math!
 
  • #44
Boffin : a personal story of the early days of radar, radio astronomy, and quantum optics
R. Hanbury Brown

https://archive.org/details/boffinpersonalst0000brow/page/n5/mode/2up

To a surprising number of people the idea that the arrival of photons at two separated detectors
can ever be correlated was not ony heretical but patently absurd... If science had a Pope we would have been excommunicated.
 
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  • #45
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  • #46
Frabjous said:
“Landau’s Theoretical Minimum, Landau’s Seminar, ITEP in the Beginning of the 1950’s”
By Boris Ioffe
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0204295

Nice find! And from one of the less soft sections of arXiv even. ;)
 
  • #48
Swamp Thing said:
Edwin Hall on his discovery of the Hall Effect:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070208040346/http://www.stenomuseet.dk/skoletj/elmag/kilde9.html

Although published as a scientific paper, it reads in part like a personal narrative... It would be fun if papers were written in that style today. Or like the old Royal Society papers.
Well, that was 1879. Scientific publishing was different then. A lot more was published.

I once read an article, probably from the late 1800's, about some guy working in a lab that had some cockroaches in it which were pissing him off.
The lab had gas lights on tubes coming out of the wall. When he found cockroaches on tubes, he would see what they would do when he heated up the tube near the wall (they went the other direction).
This got published in a scientific journal.
It was funny but stupid.
 

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