Biographies, History, Philosophy of Physics

[sbrothy]

Yes. The Manhattan Project ran from 1942 to 1946. Rutherford died in 1937 and Haber in 1934, so I honestly don't know how I managed to mess up that bad. I think the moral, or rather hypocrisy, of the, now firmly established apocryphal story speaks to me in some way. Rutherford may have refused to shake Haber's hand but if so it cannot have had much, if anything at all, to do with atomic bombs.

I've got to erase it from my brain because it makes little to no sense, and I'm embarrassing myself.

Sorry.

 

[pines-demon]

Yes. The Manhattan Project ran from 1942 to 1946. Rutherford died in 1937 and Haber in 1934, so I honestly don't know how I managed to mess up that bad. I think the moral, or rather hypocrisy, of the, now firmly established apocryphal story speaks to me in some way. Rutherford may have refused to shake Haber's hand but if so it cannot have had much, if anything at all, to do with atomic bombs.

I've got to erase it from my brain because it makes little to no sense, and I'm embarrassing myself.

Sorry.

Don't be so hard on yourself we all do mistakes. I find much worse inaccuracies every day just looking at social media.

 

[robphy]

Some history behind the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.
(I visited PI when it was just the brownstone on King and Dupont (Google Maps) [in the video at &t=2m21s] to visit my advisor who was spending a sabbatical there. I've never been to the current site (Google Maps).)

17m33s
(2026) Perimeter: Building Canada’s theoretical physics institute

58,469 views Premiered Apr 9, 2026
What does it take to build a world-class physics institute from scratch?

Perimeter Institute is a world-leading center for theoretical physics, dedicated to unraveling the deepest mysteries of the universe. Through groundbreaking research, innovative training programs, and inspiring outreach initiatives, we bring together brilliant minds from around the globe to explore space, time, matter, and beyond.

Founded with the vision of fostering collaboration and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, Perimeter is a place where curiosity thrives, and transformative ideas take shape.

Filmed and produced by Digital Sabbath.

 

[sbrothy]

History and Philosophy of Physics:

Reading this thread (Exploring Implicit Assumptions and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics) I kinda wanted to throw Hermann Weyl's classic The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics in there. Specifically these quotes. But as I'm way out of my league, don't really understand the book myself, and mostly have Wikipedia links I have no business inserting myself into that discussion. I'll just leave this "funny" desciption, from Wiki's link to Weyls book, here:

John Archibald Wheeler wrote of learning quantum mechanics from Weyl's book, "His style is that of a smiling figure on horseback, cutting a clean way through, on a beautiful path, with a swift bright sword." Edward Condon called the text "authoritative". Julian Schwinger said of it, "I read and re-read that book, each time progressing a little farther, but I cannot say that I ever – not even to this day – fully mastered it. The book was one of the first works to give a quantitative statement of the uncertainty principle, which Werner Heisenberg had previously introduced in a less precise way. Weyl credited the idea to Wolfgang Pauli. (Robertson, who later translated Weyl's book into English, cited the argument Weyl gave as the basis for his own generalization of the uncertainty principle to arbitrary noncommuting observables.) Moreover, it contains an early description of density matrices and quantum entanglement, and it uses what quantum information theory would later call the Weyl–Heisenberg group to give a finite-dimensional version of the canonical commutation relation.

How Weyl stumbled across electricity while pursuing mathematical justice

Russell on Weyl's unified field theory

H. Weyl's and E. Cartan's proposals for infinitesimal geometry in the early 1920s