Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2005 APS April Meeting
Saturday–Tuesday, April 16–19, 2005; Tampa, FL
Session U11: History of Physics III (Followed by FHP Business Meeting) |
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Robert H. Romer, Amherst College Room: Marriott Tampa Waterside Room 7 |
Monday, April 18, 2005 3:30PM - 3:54PM |
U11.00001: My Half-Hour with Einstein Robert H. Romer Midway during my first year as a Princeton graduate student (1952-53), I was given a letter of introduction to Einstein. Over a year later I finally worked up my courage to use it and -- as a result -- enjoyed a one-on-one conversation with him in the study of his home on Mercer Street. I will describe how my chance to meet Einstein arose and what I can remember of our memorable (to me if not to him) conversation. Among other things, we discussed the bomb, the new state of Israel, fossil horse brains, and evolution. (``Has there really been enough \textit{time} for all those changes?'') We talked about the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky problem - though not by that name, and I believe that it was the ``Bohm version'' that he asked me about. (``Do you \textit{really} believe that if someone here measured the spin of an atom, it could affect the simultaneous measurement of the spin of another atom way over there?'') My major recollection is of my wish that I had been better prepared. As Ehrenfest once wrote: ``Nothing is shabbier than the feeling: now God has granted me the opportunity to meet this man, and I sat before him open-mouthed; how much I might have asked him -- but nothing at all occurred to me.'' [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2005 3:54PM - 4:18PM |
U11.00002: Did Heisenberg Spit at Max Born? Harry Lustig In his 1985 book ``The Griffin,'' Arnold Kramish quotes an unnamed ``associate'' of Max Born that when Heisenberg ''was . . . a professor in G\"ottingen and when the Borns went to visit him, they were met with anti-Jewish sneers and obscenities, and in the end Heisenberg spat on the floor at Max Born's feet!". Kramish, in his own words, states that Heisenberg spat at Born and that the incident took place in 1933. Paul Lawrence Rose places the incident in 1953 and, on the basis of a fuller account from Kramish than the one published, identifies the associate as Born's secretary at Edinburgh University. One may be critical of Heisenberg's character and his behavior under the Nazis, and still be highly skeptical of the Kramish-Rose allegation. The life-long friendship between Born and Heisenberg and the respect which they displayed for each other before, during, and after the Nazi regime, has hardly been challenged by anyone. No known biography of Heisenberg mentions the alleged episode, and none of his obituaries alludes to it. There is no reference to it in Born's autobiography. None of the historians of science, German and American, whom I have consulted credit it. Although it is difficult to prove a negative, it is highly unlikely that Heisenberg spit at Born or on the floor on which they stood. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2005 4:18PM - 4:42PM |
U11.00003: The Rayleigh Papers Thomas Miller, Benjamin Bederson The Third Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919), aka John William Strutt, was among the most stellar physicists of the Nineteenth Century, in both theory and experiment. He spent most of his mature years in his own laboratory, self-funded, on his family estate. One of the consequences was the fact that all of his papers remained at the estate upon his death. After his son's (Robert John Strutt, 1875-1947) death both their scientific papers ended up on the auction block. (Robert John was himself an atmospheric physicist.) Part of the Strutt collection went to the Burndy Library of the Dibner Institute at MIT, but most landed in the library at the US Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory (now the~Air Force~Research Laboratory at Hansom AFB), purchased from the auctioneer out of library funds, for {\$}9,000. The individual most responsible for preserving these papers was John N. Howard, the laboratory~Chief Scientist, who~was~a founding editor of the journal Applied Optics. Recently the authors examined first hand the Rayleigh papers. Included in these are a complete set of his handwritten scientific notes, taken over the period 1862-1919, from the time he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge until just months before his death. We will show a number of interesting examples from these notes, including his first identification of~ argon, as well as some other fascinating items from the collection. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2005 4:42PM - 5:06PM |
U11.00004: On The Hilbert-Einstein Priority Dispute Friedwardt Winterberg I had recently shown (Z. Naturforsch. 59a, 715 (2004)), the claim by Corry, Renn and Stachel (SCIENCE 278, 1270 (1997)), that Hilbert did not anticipate Einstein in deriving the gravitational field equations of general relativity is of no probative value because their conclusion is based on a set of printer's proofs from which 1/3 of a sheet, with both sides missing, has been cut off, a fact not mentioned in their paper. It has long been known that Hilbert had obtained these equations before Einstein. Renn is quoted in the Washington Post of November 14, 1997, with the statement: ``I had personally come to the conclusion that Einstein plagiarized Hilbert.'' As admitted by Corry, Renn and Stachel the cut-off part contained the Ricci invariant which enters Hilbert's variational principle. His field equations and the variational principle from which they follow, are still in the proofs, but not his abbreviation for the variational derivative, containing the trace term missing in all of Einstein's previous papers. My findings are cited by C. J. Bjerknes in: ``Anticipations of Einstein''. Logunov, Mestvirishvili, and Petrov (U.F. Nauk 174,663 (2004)), come to the same conclusion. [Preview Abstract] |
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