Hawks, Doves, and Various Avian Hybrids February 16, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, George Kistiakowsky, Harold Brown, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John Wheeler, Leo Szilard
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The earliest version of this post embarrassingly misrepresented the AEC General Advisory Committee’s 1949 position on hydrogen bomb development. Having caught out my error, I have inserted a correction below. —Will
There is an interesting post by Darin over at PACHSmörgåsbord discussing a recent PACHS colloquium given by Terry Christensen on physicists and Cold War politics, with commentary by Erik Rau (one of the few other historians who has written much about the history of operations research). I’m a little bummed not to have seen the talk. I obviously can’t comment on specific points. But I gather from Darin’s summary that it had mainly to do with why Edward Teller (1908-2003) has a bad historical reputation, where fellow Cold War hawk John Wheeler (1911-2008) (about whom Christensen has written) does not. The postwar government activities of physicists is a frequently-visited topic, but it has not been systematically addressed, and, in all but the most sophisticated accounts, it is still rather coarsely-parsed. I’ve been gathering information on it lately, and thought I would offer a few preliminary thoughts about the complex relationship between physicists and American Cold War militarism.
Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Gift of Carlo Wick
Primer: Project Matterhorn and Early Fusion Research May 28, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Edward Frieman, Edward Teller, Francis Chen, Gary Weisel, Hans Bethe, Ira Bernstein, Joan Lisa Bromberg, John Wheeler, Lyman Spitzer Jr., Martin Kruskal, Russell Kulsrud
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At this moment, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is preparing to come online at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (see the New York Times story). The goal of NIF is to study small-scale nuclear fusion ignited by a precisely focused array of 192 high-power lasers. Reflecting a situation often seen in higher profile with America’s space program, the project is vastly over-budget, and its worth has been subjected to extensive criticism. Nuclear fusion has for decades remained a subject of intensive study and perpetually unmet promise. The “Array of Contemporary American Physicists” on which I am now at work for the AIP History Center will have fusion and related plasma research as one of its focuses, and includes information on some of those involved in the NIF as well as in prior generations of research.
Lyman Spitzer explains the “stellarator” at the Second Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, 1958
The study of nuclear fusion dates to the 1930s, when an emerging theoretical understanding of subatomic forces and particles suggested a way of accounting for the energy produced by stars and the synthesis of elements within them, as worked out by German émigré physicist Hans Bethe. During World War II, it was understood that artificial fusion could be created by using a fission bomb to ignite nuclear fuel—the idea behind the “super” or “hydrogen” bomb. This possibility was pursued during the war by Hungarian émigré physicist Edward Teller, and, following debate on whether (more…)
Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives May 20, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Hugh Everett, John Wheeler, Niels Bohr
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OK, it’s Wednesday, but this morning’s post is going to be a quick reflection on an episode of Nova I saw last night on Hugh Everett III and his son Mark, better known as E, the leader of the band Eels. Perhaps surprisingly for a historian of physics, I’ve been aware of E much longer than I’ve been aware of Everett—back in college we used to play Eels albums a lot. Their (his) second album, 1998’s Electro-shock Blues is a particularly depressing ride through his reaction to his mother’s death from cancer and his sister’s suicide (but ending in the uplifting “P.S. You Rock My World”). I did not, however, know that E was Everett’s son. Hugh Everett died of a heart attack in 1982 at the age of 51.
Everett is best-known as the progenitor of the “Many Worlds Interpretation” of quantum mechanics, which he put out to challenge the Copenhagen Interpretation in the late 1950s as a graduate student at Princeton. As a way of circumventing the problem of the seemingly arbitrary “collapse” of wave functions when “observed”, he supposes that instead of collapsing, different possibilities propagate in different realities—in its most technical, least ontological manifestation, this is the idea of the “universal” wave function. Everett’s advisor, John Wheeler, encouraged him, even setting up a meeting with Copenhagen guru Niels Bohr, but found that most quantum physicists rejected his new perspective out-of-hand (egged on behind the scenes by Bohr).
Everett decided against a career in academic physics, going to work for the (more…)
John Wheeler special issue of Physics Today April 14, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: John Wheeler
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For those interested in the history of recent physics, the April issue of Physics Today is dedicated to the career of John Wheeler (1911-2008), a major figure in the last 2/3 of 20th-century American physics. He worked on problems of the nucleus and in the design of thermonuclear weapons, and at the troublesome border between quantum physics and general relativity. The issue includes:
Ken Ford’s “John Wheeler’s work on ion particles, nuclei, and weapons” (available for free at the Physics Today website).
Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and Wojciech Zurek’s “John Wheeler, relativity, and quantum information”.
Oregon State history of science graduate student (and former Merchant Marine captain) Terry Christensen’s, “John Wheeler’s mentorship: An enduring legacy”.
There are also two articles by Wheeler himself drawn from the archives: “Mechanism of fission” (1967), a retrospective on early fission research; and “Introducing the Black Hole” (1971, with Remo Ruffini), a semi-technical introduction to the physics of black holes.
The Niels Bohr Library and Archives, incidentally, has two transcripts of interviews with Wheeler online, one from 1967, and one from 1993, which served as notes for Wheeler’s autobiography (co-written with interviewer Ford).
Ether Wave Propaganda 