Max Dresden – författare

Editors Laurie Brown, Max Dresden and Lillian Hoddeson have assembled a prestigious group of physicists and historians of science to present a broadly balanced picture of this exciting scientific era that witnessed the coming of age of particle physics and its development into 'big science'. The historical studies and analyses provided in the volume are unique in their scope and level of detail. Major topics and developments addressed include the important experiments and their theoretical explanations, the design and construction of scientific instruments and the establishment of major research centres - especially the national laboratories that played a key role in the transformation of particle physics into 'big science'. These essays also range from sociological analyses of the particle physics subculture and the political aspects of research funding to discussions of symmetry and axiomatic field theory.

Editors Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan have brought together a distinguished group of elementary particle physicists and historians of science to explore the recent history of particle physics. Based on a conference held at Stanford University, this is the third volume of a series recounting the history of particle physics and offers the most up-to-date account of the rise of the Standard Model, which explains the microstructure of the world in terms of quarks and leptons and their interactions. Major contributors include Steven Weinberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Michael Redhead, Silvan Schweber, Leon Lederman and John Heilbron. The wide-ranging articles explore the detailed scientific experiments, the institutional settings in which they took place, and the ways in which the many details of the puzzle fit together to account for the Standard Model.

It is now a little more than 11 years since the idea of writing a personal and scientific biography of H. A. Kramers took hold of me. A few days earlier I had been lecturing, in a course on field theory, on the renormalization proce­ dures of relativistic quantum field theory. Since the students had considerable trouble understanding the physical basis of the procedure, at the end of the lecture T explained that renormalization is not an exclusive quantum or relativistic procedure. A careful treatment of classical electron theory as started by Lorentz and developed in detail by Kramers also requires re­ normalization. The students appeared quite interested and I promised them that I would explain all this in more detail in the next lecture. I could have looked up this material in Kramers'' book, but I remembered that Kramers had stressed this idea in a course I had attended in Leiden in 1938-1939. I did dig up some of these old notes and, although they were considerably less transparent than my recollection seemed to indicate, they reminded me force­ fully of the thrilling days I had spent in Leiden with Kramers. Kramers'' deep insight and originality were apparent even when distorted by my opaque notes. The students had never heard of these ideas of Kramers'' and were totally unaware of his work in field theory.

It is now a little more than 11 years since the idea of writing a personal and scientific biography of H. A. Kramers took hold of me. A few days earlier I had been lecturing, in a course on field theory, on the renormalization proce­ dures of relativistic quantum field theory. Since the students had considerable trouble understanding the physical basis of the procedure, at the end of the lecture T explained that renormalization is not an exclusive quantum or relativistic procedure. A careful treatment of classical electron theory as started by Lorentz and developed in detail by Kramers also requires re­ normalization. The students appeared quite interested and I promised them that I would explain all this in more detail in the next lecture. I could have looked up this material in Kramers' book, but I remembered that Kramers had stressed this idea in a course I had attended in Leiden in 1938-1939. I did dig up some of these old notes and, although they were considerably less transparent than my recollection seemed to indicate, they reminded me force­ fully of the thrilling days I had spent in Leiden with Kramers. Kramers' deep insight and originality were apparent even when distorted by my opaque notes. The students had never heard of these ideas of Kramers' and were totally unaware of his work in field theory.